


"...Slowly We Fell Into Slumber, And I Held You Until The End Of..."

by Chronolith



Category: Labyrinth (1986), Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: (except for shiro & keith because that took way less time than advertised), Alternate Universe - Labyrinth Fusion, Alternate Universe - Magical Realism, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Bad Decisions, Body Horror, Complicated Relationships, F/M, Fae Magic, Fae politics, Gratuitous use of Welsh, M/M, Mirror Sex, Mirrors are bad news, Multi, Porn With Plot, Slow Burn, Smut, Unreliable Narrator, because the lesser goblins are creepy little fuckers, especially fae mirrors that talk to you, fae bullshit, so leave that the hell alone Keith
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-06
Updated: 2019-04-21
Packaged: 2020-01-05 18:47:07
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 31,645
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18371948
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chronolith/pseuds/Chronolith
Summary: Maybe someone should have mentioned to Lance that itis, in fact, possible to wish someone away to the Goblin King if you're pissed off enough.Keith just wants his 6 humanities credits. He did not sign up for this.(or; a Labyrinth au that took a hard right turn at 'weird fae bullshit' and decided to stay there.)(In my defense, I was dared.)





	1. [Enter a Fairy through one door, through another Puck]

I met a lady in the meads  
Full beautiful – a faery’s child  
Her hair was long, her foot was light,  
And her eyes were wild.  
\-- _La Belle Sans Merci_ , John Keats

 

“Hark, now, what uh – line?”

Lance lets his forehead hit the little plywood slat lain over two seats that serves as the director’s table with a little _thunk_ and then rolls it a few times for added emphasis, the rough grain of the wood digging into his skin. “Shiro,” he says softly. “What the actual fuck.”

A stagehand darts across the stage with a black binder and a flashlight to the actor standing confused and stiff in the center light. She shoots a tremulous glance into the darkened house and hunches a little at what she sees before popping open the binder.

“Oh! I’ve heard that one before. Okay, I know it now.”

“Now he knows it,” Lance says in horrified disbelief. “It’s only one of the most famous dialogues ever written by Shakespeare. What the fuck, Shirogane.”

“He’s an astrophysics major,” Shiro answers and Lance groans, both at the information and the starry-eyed way Shiro says it. 

“You cast a _STEM_ major,” Lance says slowly, as if through a careful recitation of these basic facts they will somehow change.

— “Over hill, over dale,” recites a bright-eyed freshman, her make-up already suggesting her role with glitter dusted high across her cheeks. —

“As _Puck_ ,” Lance continues at a low growl, “for my _senior project_.” Lance doesn’t lift up his head, just breathes against the plywood and tries to find the words to fit his offense and rage inside of. “Do you hate me?” he asks. “Is that what this is? You want me to fail, flame out so gloriously that it’ll be told in hushed whispers across the department for years, no, decades to come. My flame out—and, let me be very clear about this, your subsequent murder—will become part of our department’s apocrypha. That’s what you want.”

“I’m sure he can be coached.”

Lance turns his head without picking it up from the plywood and just stares at Shiro. He’s sure he’s got gross little wood filings from the plywood stuck to his skin, but he absolutely does not give a fuck.

“The king doth keep his revels here tonight,” the actor intones with the impressive range and depth one might give a particularly dry reading of the phonebook. “Take heed the queen come not within his sight—"

“I am going to fucking kill you,” Lance tells his sub-director. 

Shiro has the audacity to laugh.

“For Oberon is passing feel. Feel? Uh, no, don’t tell me I know I fucked it up,” the actor runs a hand through his shaggy hair—a fucking mullet, what the fuck, Lance is going to spontaneously combust from rage—and shakes his head as he mutters to himself. “Oberon, Oberon, is passing, uh. Fell! Fell and wrath, because that she as her attendant has—”

“Remember when I found you Romelle?” Shiro says soothingly. “Stuttered everywhere, so shy she couldn’t look anyone in the eye and I told you she would be amazing if you just gave her a chance.”

“Romelle _wanted_ that part,” Lance grinds out, low and snarling. “She followed me around campus for weeks. She jumped out of pocket dimensions, I swear, to give me impromptu monologues. She handed me notebooks full of sketches of Belly. Once we worked through her little stage fright issue, it was fine. Because she _wanted_ it.”

“You threatened to strangle her with her own hair and made her cry at every rehearsal for two weeks straight.”

“We. Worked. Through. It,” Lance repeats. Slowly. Careful with his diction because apparently his subdirector had developed a sudden hearing impediment. “Because she wanted it. This asshole is here because, what? What?! You want him to gargle your cock. That’s what.”

“ _Lance_.”

“Oh,” Lance says. “Because you want to gargle _his_ cock. This is not how I wanted to discover that you are a bottom, Shirogane.”

“You wanted to know if I was a bottom?” Shiro asks, all sweet surprise. When Lance glowers at him, Shiro waggles his eyebrows in a salacious manner. “You could have just asked.”

“I’m going to kill you,” Lance says again as if somehow this time the threat would actually percolate through his subdirector’s lust-addled head. “I don’t care if you were a decorated soldier with a purple heart and everything. I am going to kill you with a rusted-out shovel and bury your body in a cranberry bog.”

Shiro laughs again and runs a soothing hand over Lance’s spine. Lance grumbles and presses his forehead back against the plywood. He thinks about maybe covering his ears to block out the sound of the object of Shiro’s thirst make a complete hash out of one of one of the best-known dialogues in the English language. He can hear his senior project going up in monotone, flat flames with every butchered line. 

“I’m sure he can be coached,” Shiro says with the conviction of a man who is bound and determined to get that dick. “He’ll be great.”

“He can’t learn his lines if he’s gagging on your cock, Shirogane.”

“ _Lance_.”

* * *

“I’m really not sure I’m cut out for this part,” Keith says quietly to Shiro as Lance stomps off yelling, actors scattering in his wake like frightened chickens. The bang of heavy door rattles around backstage. It’s a really impressive demonstration of temper though Keith has no idea why the guy is getting that worked up about some shitty student production of Shakespeare that no one is gonna come to anyway. 

Drama. Fucking. Queen.

“Nah, you just need to work on it a little,” Shiro says with a reassuring smile. Keith shoots him an incredulous look and that smile grows into something broad and conspiratorial and so, so gorgeous. “Besides, don’t you want to prove him wrong?”

Now that it’s been said, Keith kind of does. 

After listening to the director rant, in multiple languages (like Keith doesn’t know what _pendajo_ means), there’s a heat bubbling in his veins. The same heat that crops up anytime a professor says no one gets As in this course, or someone says there’s no way that bike will run again, or someone says—soft and full of scorn—that some gutter-born brat from the system could make anything out of themselves. 

It’s the heat that whispers, vicious and defiant, in his blood: _you just fucking watch me._

He eyes Shiro thoughtfully and full of suspicion. That charming grin goes sideway, grows into a smirk that’s both hot and disconcerting. Shiro shoves his hands in his pockets and it takes a monumental act of willpower on Keith’s part not to stare at the way Shiro’s jeans go tight across his crotch. That smirk grows, just a touch, as Keith snaps his eyes back up to Shiro’s face.

“Maybe,” Keith says with a diffident little shoulder shrug. Because like hell is he going to show his cards that easily.

“Maybe,” Shiro echoes, drawing the word out, slow and considering like he was giving Keith’s answer any sort of thought. Shiro cocks his head to the side, rocks back on his heels a little bit, and raises his eyebrow. “What if I sweetened the deal?”

Keith ignores the way that sentence, heavy and sweet with innuendo, makes his mouth go dry as a desert. He tries not to shift nervously, because Shiro’s watching him with an expression that is entirely too knowing for someone who’s only known him for two months, perhaps less. “I wasn’t aware we were talking about deals,” Keith says and is enormously pleased when his tone stays level and calm like they were discussing the weather, not engaging in something that looked an awful lot like flirting. He’s _shit_ at flirting. “I’m just here for my six credits.”

Shiro laughs like Keith’s said something hilarious and surprising. Keith doesn’t think this should be surprising. He’s been pretty upfront with his intentions. He doesn’t give a flying fuck about theatre of any kind, much less a shitty college production of some long dead dude’s weird acid trip. But he needs six humanities credits to graduate early and this is the easiest, fastest, and—most important in Keith’s way of thinking—the _cheapest_ way of getting those credits. This is supposed to be easy. He’s been lied to. 

“There are always deals when it comes to retaining star talent,” Shiro says with every indication that he’s being completely serious. Which. What? Keith knows that he’s a firmly mediocre as an actor as best. Which is fine, it’s a shit college production of a shit play. He doesn’t need to be the second coming of Lawrence Olivier. He just needs to stop fumbling his lines.

“Talent,” Keith repeats, voice dripping scorn the way an assassin’s blade drips poison. “ _Star_ talent.”

Shiro shrugs, a lazy roll of shoulders that don’t have any right being anywhere as broad as that. “Just calling it as I see it.”

Keith makes a disbelieving noise.

The grin he gets in response is devastating. A ten-ten hit to his nervous system. Leaves him stunned and stuttering. Keith scowls on reflex, certain that somehow this ridiculous man is making fun of him. “I’m an astrophysics major.”

“Me too. Well, double majored with theatre,” Shiro replies easily as Keith boggles at him. “What’s your point?”

Keith makes a gesture that takes in the entirety of the arts building with its neurotic student population and their delusions of grandeur. “I don’t … _do_ stuff like this. I don’t see why it matters so much. It’s just dumb, pretentious bullshit.”

“Harsh,” Shiro says with a grin.

“No one’s life was saved by a fucking play,” Keith snaps, nettled in spite of himself. “If tomorrow morning we woke up and forgot every play ever written nothing would be lost. Not like. Like.” Keith casts around for a good counterpoint in the face of Shiro’s amused smirk. “Calculus.”

Shiro laughs. Tips his head back and laughs so hard that Keith can watch his abs work under his shirt. It is unfair how fast that makes his mouth turn to dust and the space between his ears turn to static.

“Calculus,” Shiro says once he stops chortling.

Keith scowls. “Calculus builds bridges. Planes. Hospitals,” he argues. “What does a bunch of words on a page do? Fucking nothing. So, what if my affect is ‘flat’? All I need to do is fucking recite the lines in the right order. No one dies if I get it wrong.”

Shiro’s grin hasn’t dropped one degree during Keith’s rant. If anything, it gets wider. “So,” Shiro says as Keith sucks in air like a drowning man, “you still think you aren’t cut out for the part?”

It’s a dirty manipulative trick. Even Keith can see how it’s a dirty manipulative trick. He grins with all his teeth. “Fuck you.”

* * *

“Fuck,” Keith groans, tightens his grip in Shiro’s ridiculous two-toned hair, tries not to lose his entire godsdamned mind, “ _Fuck_.”

Shiro hums deep in his throat—the vibrations of _that_ rattle through Keith like a runaway train—pleased and somehow smug, as he bobs his head further down Keith’s cock. He’s got one hand wrapped tight around the base. An iron band holding Keith’s orgasm back like a wall. All Keith can do is it sit with his bare ass on scratched up leather and take whatever Shiro decides to give him.

There’s a long, slow moment as Shiro drags his mouth back up Keith’s cock, coming off with a soft pop. “Pretty,” Shiro says with that wicked, evil smile. He touches his tongue to the slit of Keith’s cock, playing with it, and Keith strains against the hand holding his hips down so hard he’s pretty sure he’s going to pull a muscle. “Nah, baby,” Shiro croons, “not yet.”

The noise that rips out of Keith’s mouth isn’t pretty and sure as shit isn’t sexy. 

But Shiro grins like it’s the best sound he’s ever heard. He drags his tongue up Keith’s cock like it’s a lollipop. It’s slick and obscene, spit shiny on his dick in the dim light of Shiro’s only lamp. It’s the hottest fucking thing that’s ever happened to him. Keith writhes in Shiro’s hold. Mouth popping open around the syllables of a moan if he could just get his lungs to work. He’s desperate, mindless, but Shiro keeps him pinned to the shitty, tattered couch. Takes him apart with little licks. Wraps his lips around the head of Keith’s cock and suckles sweetly. 

Something bubbles out of Keith’s mouth that has the barest suggestion of words.

Shiro laughs against his cock, low and rumbling. “What was that, baby?” He mouths at Keith’s cock, gets it wet to the point of dripping, rubs his cheek against it like he was snuggling a plush toy. Not, you know, Keith’s swollen, aching erection with pre-cum beading along its head like a fountain. Shiro delicately licks up a drop. Licks his lips. “Something you want?”

“I,” Keith starts, voice a ragged suggestion of a human tone, but Shiro slides his hands down Keith’s thighs, spreads them _wider_ and Keith’s entire brain shuts down around the sight. 

He meets Keith’s eyes, gaze scorching, before sliding his mouth down Keith’s cock slow, slow, slow.

“ _Shit_ ,” Keith stutters. He tries to buck up into the wet heat of Shiro’s mouth, but Shiro keeps his hips still with just one heavy hand. “Please, fuck, I can’t. I _can’t_.” He’s got both hands in Shiro’s hair, fingers flexing, as he resists the urge to drag Shiro down his cock hard and fast. Because he’s not an asshole. But shit does he ever want to. Wants it more than he’s ever wanted anything in his life. “Shiro, _please_.”

It’s monumentally unfair how easily Shiro can keep him right where he wants him. Keith watches through the haze of lust that seems to have completely shorted out all of his higher cognitive functions as the muscles in Shiro’s forearm flex. He knows, academically, that it’s possible to have muscle definition there, but it’s an entirely different thing to watch those muscle be put to work to keep him pinned, still, _obedient_. 

“Fuck,” Keith hisses as his cock hits the back of Shiro’s throat. He’s not. He’s never had. Oh gods, he is going to die on this objectively terrible couch. Shiro pulls back, makes a thoughtful sound, like he’s been presented with a complicated math problem and then swallows Keith back down. One, perfect wet slide of his mouth all the way down Keith’s cock. Keith gapes. He intellectually _knows_ this is possible, but feeling Shiro swallow around him, a perfect wet pulse, is not a thing he’d ever thought would be within his meagre collection of good memories.

“Shiro, _Shiro_ ,” Keith chants like he’s forgotten every other word.

He’s so close. _So_ close. He can feel it building in his veins like a slow-moving fire. Lava curling in the pit of his belly. Electricity humming along his entire nervous system. His breath goes short. Stutters into desperate little pants against the tender, careful pleasure Shiro lavishes on him. Shiro’s hands tighten against his thighs. Just a little pulse, but Keith knows he’s gonna have bruises there. Ten perfect dark marks on his pale skin.

Shiro drags his mouth back to the very tip of Keith’s cock. “Those aren’t your lines,” he says around the head. His lips the best/worst tease as he chides Keith like he hadn’t been sucking Keith’s brains out his dick seconds before. “I thought you could remember your lines around _any_ distraction?”

Keith is going to die. He is going to die because he’s an arrogant asshole whose mouth does not know when to shut up when confronted with a gorgeous man. 

He mouths something soundlessly as Shiro slides his mouth along his cock again. Lips soft and wet against him. 

“You do their work, and they shall have good luck,” Shiro recites like he isn’t pressing feather soft kisses against Keith’s thighs, his cock, all while watching him with eyes blown dark and wanting. “Are not you he?”

 _Fuck_.

“Thou speake—,” the words die in his mouth, an undignified gurgle, as Shiro swallows him down again. Shiro arches an eyebrow even as Keith’s dick stretches his mouth into an obscene, perfect ‘o’. Keith knows what he wants. Say the lines, get an orgasm. Keith is going to die from sexual frustration. 

The stubborn, asshole part of him that hates losing drags itself out of his haze of lust. 

“Thou speakest aright,” he rasps. His voice is a fucked out, terrible thing. “I am the merry wanderer of the night. I jest to Oberon, and make him smile…”

Shiro lavishes his cock with tender attention as Keith claws his way through Puck’s introduction through sheer cussedness and determination. Shiro pulls out all his worst tricks. Lets his throat flutter around the head of Keith’s cock. Stares up at him with tear-blurry eyes. Whimpers out the smallest, sweetest sound when he lets Keith buck his hips just a tiny bit. 

Keith gasps out the last of the lines. His fists buried in his own hair like he can physically drag himself out of mindless arousal.

“That was so good, baby,” Shiro husks. A line of spit glimmers from his mouth to Keith’s dick and Keith is going to spontaneously combust. All that’s gonna be left of him is jizz and ash. He whimpers in the most pathetic manner a man has ever whimpered when Shiro slowly pumps his dick. His orgasm is a tsunami that will no longer be held back. Shiro licks a broad stripe up his dick. “You can come now,” he says like that’s all Keith is waiting for. Shiro’s permission. “You’ve earned it.”

Maybe he has been waiting for Shiro’s permission, because his orgasm hits him like a truck. He arches up, his back a trembling bridge of straining muscle, as Shiro swallows around him. The world goes white and hazy.

Shiro lets Keith’s dick fall from his mouth with the most obscene noise Keith has ever heard. Lazy, like this isn’t something straight out of porn, Shiro opens wide to show Keith his own cum pooling white and thick on Shiro’s tongue before Shiro swallows it down. He whines, oversensitive, when Shiro thumbs the head of his cock.

“First act,” Shiro says with the wicked grin that led Keith to this place in the first place. “Four more.”

Keith is going to _die_.

* * *

Lance is making a noise reminiscent of a tea kettle left on the stove too long. Or an enraged cat about to extract its revenge. A high, hissing sound of pure, undistilled fury. Normally Shiro’d find this hilarious, because nothing is quite as funny as one infuriated Lance Serrano ranting at high speed, but he has the self-preservation instincts sufficient to realize that this probably does not bode well for his immediate future. 

He contrives to look as small as possible. 

This is largely unsuccessful because he is, at last health check, a six-foot two-inch man weighting in at around two-hundred some odd pounds. But he does try.

“Shirogane,” Lance says after it becomes obvious that hissing like murderous adder isn’t going to produce whatever result it is that he desires. “I thought you said he could be coached.”

“He can!” Shiro chirps with perhaps a little too much good cheer. Going over lines with Keith had been a _very_ good time. He resists the urge to lick his lips. Lance’s stare threatens to drill straight through his head. Even though Shiro knows Lance has spent time perfecting that deadly glower for recalcitrant actors he still feels as if his director might actually be able to scrape his skull back with the sheer force of his glare and read all the thoughts there. He squirms, just a little, under the intensity of that stare. 

“Shirogane,” Lance repeats in a slow, measured tone that means Lance has hit the very ends of his temper and is grasping at the fraying edges like a man desperate not to have full-steam, screaming meltdown this early in the semester.

Shiro makes an attentive noise. 

Lance looks down at their little plywood table. Breathes out through his nose. Tries again. “Takashi,” he says without look up. “Why is the actor currently playing Puck turning the same colour as my aunt Esmeralda’s prized tomatoes every time he looks into the house?”

“He’s shy?”

“Shy.” Lance’s tone is so flat that Shiro thinks they should maybe use it for the directors’ table rather than rather the warped bit of plywood Hunk had scrounged up from Shiro honestly doesn’t want to know where. Shiro can hear the odd sound of Lance sucking on his teeth. “Pause. Turn on that big, supposedly better than the rest of us lowly humanities students engineering brain. Come up with a better lie,” Lance says tightly. “What I’m saying is: try again.”

“You make him nervous?”

“Hah,” Lance says. “Hah. Hah. Do you hear the sounds of my dulcet yet disbelieving laughter, Shirogane? If I fail my senior project because you wanted that D I am taking you down with me, do you understand me? I will bury you under the steps to the engineer sciences building as a curse upon every STEM major that has ever had the poor taste and maladjusted sense of self to foist their noxious selves off on poor, undeserving humanities students who only wanted to make the world a more beautiful place.”

There is a pause where they both consider this rant.

“Except the sculpture students,” Lance adds. “Because fuck those pretentious bitches.”

“Isn’t Nyma in the sculpture concentration?”

“I will cut out your spleen with a dull spoon.”

“You talked to Keith before rehearsal, didn’t you?”

“If by talked you mean: I told him that if he didn’t have his lines memorized by the end of the week I’d drop him for his understudy and use his dead body to fertilize my abuelita’s roses. And then _he_ informed _me_ that memorizing a bunch ‘stupid ass, badly rhymed phrases shouldn’t even count for credits that the university charges him for because any four-year-old could do it.’ And then he told me that he looks forward to watching me flip burgers. Excellent taste you got there, Shirogane. I hope his blowjob skills are stellar because his personality suggests that he’s been raised by wolves.”

Shiro chokes out an offended noise. He’s not even sure which part of that rant offends him. Perhaps just the entire thing on general principles.

Lance eyes him like he’s just dragged in dog shit. “I’m sorry,” Lance says sweetly. “That was insulting to wolves.”

Shiro blinks at him. “You are a catty, catty bitch when you are angry.”

“Did you just notice this?” Lance demands. “These are the vaulted observational powers of the high and mighty STEM majors at work. Is that what you are telling me? You are just now discovering— Just now noticing—” Lance pauses. Looks up at the ceiling as if beseeching higher powers for mercy or maybe just help hiding the bodies. “I am going to fucking kill you.”

Definitely help hiding the bodies.

“He remembers all his lines now,” Shiro offers. The glare Lance shoots him could strip paint.

“Great,” Lance cheers with that saccharine sweet tone that suggests he’s seriously contemplating what Shiro’s guts will look like as garters. “Grand. So does his understudy. Guess what his understudy can do, Shirogane? _Emote_. Convince the audience that he is an actual human being and not a robot in a skin suit.”

“He’s not that bad.”

“He is _entirely_ that bad.”

They glare at each other. Lance, through sheer incandescent fury, wins the contest. 

“Please tell me you have fucked the pretty boy with the bad hair so I can drop him for his understudy who can actually, you know, _act_ ,” Lance demands. “Tell me you have gargled that cock.”

Shiro can feel the blush crawl all the way up his ears despite his best efforts.

“Excellent,” Lance says with a loud clap of his hands. “You have. Great. Let us all move on from this horrible chapter of our lives and onto brighter times not darkened by mangled renditions of the Bard’s best comedy.”

Shiro is suddenly, painfully aware that the entire theatre has gone completely silent after Lance’s piercing clap, so his last words ring out clear as church bells. All of the actors stand riveted the stage. Shiro is pretty sure they have all collectively stopped breathing in sheer, unspeakable terror of Lance’s mercurial temper. Keith stands on the stage glaring out into the house even as a blush climbs up to the very tips of his ears.

It is _so_ cute. Keith is _so cute_.

Lance makes a disgusted noise. When Shiro manages to drag his gaze to his director, Lance giving him a disbelieving, disappointed glower.

“You are beyond disgusting,” he says. “How the mighty have fallen. I want you to know that you are the mighty in this scenario and you have fallen. For a mullet. You bring shame upon your ancestors, Shirogane. You bring shame upon their cow.”

“I … don’t have a cow?”

“Lucky cow,” Lance says dryly. “Also, brush up on your Disney films because that sentence managed to be more shameful than the fact you are gargling the mullet’s cock.”

In the pin-drop silence of the theatre Lance’s sentence echoes like shot fired by Gavrilo Princip. If Keith’s face had been red before, it is now the colour of traffic lights and the hair of freshmen art students. A perfect #FF0000 hex code applied to human skin. Shiro is entirely certain his face wears a matching hue. Lance’s expression is a three-part meme titled ‘Done.’ 

Shiro _wants_ to say something in his defense. In Keith’s defense. But Lance’s unimpressed glower keeps him pinned where he sits. 

“Right,” Lance says as if something has been decided. “Kogane,” he barks. “Go do whatever deeply important STEM major bullshit it is you have to do. You are fired. Curtis!” Lance’s demanding yell rattles through the shocked theatre like thunder. “Get your ass up here. It’s go time.”

“You can’t just fire me,” Keith sputters.

“Oh,” Lance croons. “I think you’ll find I can. It comes with the whole ‘director’ thing.” Lance flicks both middle fingers up as he points to himself. “I am the director. This is my project. And thus, mullet, my word is law and it is not _my_ cock you are sucking and thus I am _not_ , in fact, enthralled by your impressively inept, incoherent, and yet somehow still entirely soulless performance. Of Puck. You manage to be less engaging that paint drying while acting out Puck’s part. It’s like a whole new level of terrible I did not ask to be dragged into, and yet here you are. The most horrible of guides. You are the Virgil to my Dante, leading me through one atrocious, bland, painfully boring rendition of one of the greatest plays of the English language. But our time together has come to an end. We have reached the bottom. And now you can fuck back off into the clutches of Calculus and being better than the rest of us due to the simple fact that you are walking calculator with no conception human emotions.”

Keith gapes and then glares.

Lance makes a little flicking gesture with both hands. “Shoo, shoo, baby STEM major. You are free to run back into the grasp of your apathetic Libertarianism that is so convinced of your superiority because of your lack of a functioning soul. Fly, my robot in a skin suit, fly.”

There’s a moment where Keith processes that rant, which is vicious even by Lance’s normal standards, and then sputters. “I’m a socialist.”

“I don’t actually fucking care,” Lance responds. “You are, objectively, terrible as Puck. I think there is mold growing in my refrigerator that could give a more evocative performance.”

“I have registered for six credits for this stupid fucking play,” Keith grinds out, matching fury with sheer obstinate stubbornness. “You can’t just fire me unless I can’t act.”

“Trust me,” Lance snaps, “when I say that you cannot act. There are rocks that could give a more impressive performance and it is insulting to rocks that I would even go to that comparison.”

“Who the fuck _cares_ ,” Keith growls in response. “No one is going to come to the testament to your ridiculously inflated ego that has not a single basis in reality because literally no one gives a flying fuck about you or whatever artistic vision you think you have.”

“You are caricature of human being.”

“You are self-important fuckwit using post-modern jargon to hide the fact you haven’t had an original thought in your head in your entire life.”

“Do you even fucking know what post-modernism is, you misanthropic smear of genetic material.”

“I can _read_ , asshole. I’ve read the incoherent garbage that makes up French continentalism. Do you want me to cite Derrida? Spivak? They are all worthless pseudo-intellectuals hiding behind increasingly incoherent, recursive language because they don’t actually have anything of value to offer.”

“You are,” Lance says wonderingly. “The most perfect example of a self-absorbed asswipe that I have ever had the misfortune of running across. I wish that the Gobl—”

The air in the theatre goes still, electric with the sort of breathless anticipation that comes from an audience yearning to hear a particular line. It feels as if all the world has caught its breath in waiting. Everything spinning down to Keith, standing center-stage bathed in light, and Lance, shroud in shadows, eyes blazing with rage.

 _Oh no_ , Shiro thinks as Lance spits out his wish. He knows he should say something, cut them both off before they say something they can’t walk back from. But all he can do as the shadows seem to press in close as if they are straining to hear better is sit and stare at Keith, so small in the spotlight. Watch as Lance pulls himself to his slender full height and spit a phrase that should sound like ridiculous, but instead just sounds sinister, ominous, like a curse. Sit there like an unwitting catalyst for something terrible and think: _oh fuck_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> last time it took me roughly 60k words to get to the sex. This time, less than 1.5k. Is this what its like for everyone when they write sheith?
> 
> Title is from a lovely song that I cannot take seriously because of its title and I absolutely had to reference it because its the funniest fucking thing to me. [...Slowly We Fell Into Slumber, And I Held You Until The End Of..."](https://open.spotify.com/track/4FKWYJNZknGGBnidwNqKDs?si=maNA28osR1i56Zy5q8OMUA) Lovely song. Ridiculous title.
> 
> @Roundab00t. Bitch, you thought I was joking.
> 
> also also: i have, like, two more chapters of this in the kit but no promises for an update schedule since I defend my dissertation in, like, two months and am going insane. which is my entire justification for this fic and i am not sorry.


	2. [Enter Messenger with two heads and a hand]

“The King!” Chirps Plathu.

“The King!” Echoes Platt as it huddles up against Siâms’ foot.

“So sad, so sad,” Chulatt supplies where it sits, fat and content in the eddying ashes of the fire.

“At the pool,” Chuchule says, unusually helpful.

Siâms twitches his foot, sending the lesser goblins tumbling across the thrushes, giggling as they roll. They collapse into a pile with their fellows, the entire heap a snickering mass that is more fur and brightly coloured cloth than identifiable bodies. They chirp odd calls, his name, the King’s name, and snippets of dirty lyrics. The heap unspools into sea of tiny bodies that churn up over his feet, nearly to his knees, as they toss bits of fluff, bone, and stone to each other in parodies of children’s games. Whatever urgent errand the Goblin King had sent them on now long forgotten.

He sighs.

“Don’t let me catch you eating the Faerie Queen’s birds again,” he says rather than attempting to recall them back to their task. Little bits of fluff and bone given form through prolonged exposure to the King’s overflowing magic with the ability to hold a thought long enough to speak it, but nothing more. Chiding them is like chiding the sea for being wet. Pointless. “This is the third messenger she’s sent this cycle.”

Plathu, Platt, Chulatt, and Chuchule detach themselves from the festering sea of bodies, little faces a child’s sketch of seriousness, the unspoken leaders of the lesser goblins. The four of them grin with horrifyingly sharp teeth. “We could eat the messengers too?”

“No,” he tells them firmly. Siâms has no expectation that they’ll actually listen, but he trusts the Fae to send messengers that can survive the lesser goblins’ and their rapacious natures. 

And if not, well, it’ll be educational for everyone.

The four exchange a long look between themselves and then burst into snickers. Lesser goblins surge around them, boil up along his legs, in a great whispering tide. They make a gesture that Siâms thinks is maybe meant to be a salute before disappearing into the roiling press of little bodies, off to pursue whatever business it is that occupies them between the King’s whims. 

Whims which are, Siâms supposes, a thing to which he should attend.

There’s a trick to getting to the heart of the Labyrinth. One that changes at every dawn. But Siâms knows the trick as well as he knows his King. The path opens and closes around him. He bats a fairy into a wall idly, nasty biting little things, before stepping through. The riddle doors open their mouths only to close them with a disappointed sigh. He taught them all their tricks long ago, after all. The garden, when he steps through the final arch with its chittering spider guardians, is still and peaceful. Graceful statutes with hands outstretched point the way. 

The way to his King.

His King is a gorgeous sprawl of long, slender limbs and silver hair. Delicate chin propped up on one dainty fist as she sits staring into an ever-shifting pool of water with a petulant pout, half-hidden under the mass of feathers that makes up her traveling cloak. Siâms frowns. That cloak rarely meant anything good. It’s generally the harbinger of restless emotions, rash decisions, and an irate Faerie Queen sending insufferable messengers. He pauses to watch for a moment.

“Are you going to lurk like a common highwayman, my Knight,” Allura calls without turning her head, “or will join me?”

“I should be checking to make sure your pack of pets refrain from eating the Faerie Queen’s messenger,” he says as he picks his way towards her. The grass is a verdant green carpet and she reclines upon it like a sultan in his harem. She is a wild, spoiled thing. As beautiful and cruel as the sea in winter. He loves her _so_ much. 

She smiles up at him so broadly her dimples and fangs flash. “You shouldn’t be giving them ideas.”

He shrugs, noncommittal. “I have both delivered the Queen’s ultimatum and warned your darling subjects not to harm our guests.”

“And with a few clever turns of phrase, your obligations have been met to the very word and letter,” Allura agrees. She laughs. “One day they will learn not to give you rules, my Knight, when all you ever do with them is turn them into the sharpest of blades.”

Siâms takes one of the little crystal balls dancing in attendance around his King’s head and makes it dance across his knuckles for a moment. “The fae are not known for their adaptability.”

She takes it from him with a little blown kiss. “And thus, will they ever be handing you blades to cut their throats with.” Allura studies him from the top of his head to the tip of his toes and smiles. “I did a good day’s work with you,” she says, smug. “Best I ever did.”

“The only work you did,” he mock-grumbles. “I’ve done the rest while you run off to play games.”

“Come down here,” she demands with fingers grasping for him. 

He goes as she commands. Sliding into an easy cross-legged seat at the edge of her viewing pool even as some small, fussy part of him cringes at the idea of grass stains and fouler things. She curls into his lap like a cat demanding pets. Wraps herself around him as if she owns every part of him and basks in his warmth. Siâms tries to card his fingers through her wild mane, but the lesser goblins have gotten there first, braiding bits and bobs into it at random.

If they were of the Summer Courts, or just fae in general, she’d have flowers and gleaming gems to crown the glory of her hair. But they are goblins and the lesser of her court have no such aesthetic sense. Bits of carved antler, fractured crystal, owl feathers and bleached bone decorate the haphazard braids. Her hair is as wild and terrifying as the rest of her.

There’s a half-finished braid framing her face and he plaits it with neat, quick movements while she grins at him. He tugs it to make her yelp and pout.

“What’s caught your attention,” he asks softly. Allura could be shy about her spying on the Aboveground, quick to defensive anger. Best to approach the topic carefully. “The lesser goblins named you sorrowful.”

Allura turns her face into his shoulder. Laughs. Butts her head against him as sweet as a newborn kitten. The tension that had worked itself into his shoulders like a poison drains away as she snuggles into his lap, pleased and smug, and spreads her fingers to make one of her crystals dance between them. Whatever she’d been watching could not have been so bad as all that, if she’s content to occupy his lap like it’s her throne.

“He’s got a new play,” she says and there can be no doubt who the ‘he’ in question is. She preens, just a little. “ _A Midsummer Night’s Dream_. Did he pick it for me, you think?”

Ah. Now there, Siâms thinks, is a dangerous question. He tweaks the little plait he’d finished to make her snap her teeth at him, white and sharp, and giggle. “You’re no Titania.”

She rests her head against his shoulder. The crystals flash between her fingers for a moment longer until Allura clenches her fist, quick and hard, and they vanish. “I could be Oberon.”

He thinks about that for a moment. They both do. “Are you jealous, my king?”

A chill wind moves through their little sanctuary, sending golden leaves dancing across the grass to vanish into the Labyrinth, making him shiver, just a little, in her hold. Her eyes are very blue in her dark face as she studies him. Allura fits his face between her hands, cups it like it’s precious, and stares at him as if she could find an answer to an unspoken question in his eyes. Tilting his chin up she presses chill lips to his throat. Blows a raspberry.

Allura laughs again, high and sweet like church bells, when he jerks back out of her hold. He sends them tumbling across the grass. She wrestles with him like they are children in a hayloft and not two of the most powerful creatures in the Labyrinth. Sharp elbows and knees. Teeth at soft places and fingers pulling hair. She pins him with strong thighs across his hips, hands pressing his shoulders into the soft loam, and her grin is a horror. 

“What cause have I, King of the Goblins and ruler of the Labyrinth, to be jealous?” She asks with a toss of her hair. 

Siâms flexes his fingers against her thighs to feel the muscle there. “I don’t know, lord,” he asks—half sly, half open curiosity. “If I ask will you tell me?”

There’s a long moment when he’s not sure if she’ll scream or cry or try to rip his throat out. Allura blinks. Tilts her head to the side like the daintiest of predators and laughs. “He tells such stories,” she says. Siâms smiles at her. It’s not the first time she’s said this about her Aboveground fixation and, he’s quite certain, it will not be the last. “They are contradictions and twists and myths and such _lies_ and I love them.”

It’s not an answer to his question. And yet. Somehow it is. 

Wild magic is a difficult thing to contain. It shifts and it grows. Left too long without an outlet and it grows fetid and festering. Poisoning its bearer. Continuously used, and it grows without bounds. Allura’s overwhelming power, the wild magic that burns through her veins like the headiest whiskey, has her walking an endless tightrope. Sometimes she dances, sometimes she stumbles, but if she ever falls the Labyrinth will be there to swallow her whole.

Siâms understands part of the complicated internal world Allura maintains, but never the entirety of it. He’s not sure he’d be able to understand any explanation she’d offer if he asked. Yet, somehow, this one mortal boy’s stories—strange, inconsistent things where he is at once the hero and the villain, the center and the periphery—are a comfort to her. Siâms searches his own emotions for festering jealousy. An envy that this one human, all unknowing, could be a comfort to his King in all her riotous paradoxes and finds only relief. He breathes slowly. 

Allura smiles at him, sweet and sad and fond, like she could hear his own tangled thoughts. But then, he been hers for a long, long time. Perhaps she can.

He reaches up for her and she bends down like a benediction. 

The first kiss is as sweet as it always is. Delicate. An innocent press of lips. The second kiss is less sweet, more demanding. By the fifth she has him panting, open-mouthed, into the movement of her lips over his. Whimpering when she ghosts her fangs over his bottom lip, not enough to draw blood, but enough to remind him that she could. If she wanted. He goes pliant underneath her, splayed out and open, as she claims his mouth. 

“Allura.” Her name in his mouth is a plea, a prayer, and she answers it.

Her fingers are quick, nimble, over the little buttons and clasps of his clothes. She skins him out of them as easily as she’d skin a fish. Leaves him bare on the grass as she takes inventory of every part of him with her hands and mouth and hungry eyes. Catalogues the way he sighs when she kisses him slow and sweet. Notes how he gasps, hands clenching hard on her hips, when she takes his nipples between her fingers and tugs. Mean. Just this side of too hard. Memorizes his moans as she moves her way down his body leaving her marks over his throat and chest. Blooming bruises from her mouth and deep red lines from her nails. 

“Siâms,” she sighs as he writhes underneath her. 

There will never come time, he thinks, when he won’t be easy for her. When he won’t come undone at the simplest of her touches.

The brush of her fingers over his skin leaves him trembling, fingers digging into her hips until the corners of her mouth kicks up in a tiny smirk, and she grinds down against him. There’s only so much of her careful, meticulous teasing he can take until he rolls them to pin her to the grass and devour her laughter like the sweetest honey. There’s something delicious about being naked between her legs while she’s still clothed in leather and silk with owl feathers in her hair. 

Wind slipping down his spine with the gentlest of caresses, whispering in his ear, has Siâms pressing her down into the loam. That sweet wind plays with his hair as he spreads her mane across the grass like a blanket. It plucks at him, eager and urging, as he sits up to take in the pretty picture she makes. Dark skin and silver hair against the vibrant green of her gardens.

The day she does not steal the breath from him is the day his heart has stopped beating.

Now she reaches for him, sugar-sweet and easy, and he goes to her like the dawn rolling across the hills.

He pulls the ties of her blouse apart with his teeth. Allura laughs with each centimeter of dark flesh revealed. She buries her hands in his hair, fists them there, and urges him down her body. He takes his time to tease even as she tugs and whines and writhes. Licks her nipples until they are stiff and hard, nips his way down the firm line of her belly, smooths his hands up her thighs as he settles between them. 

The silver buckles of her breeches are harder to pull apart with his teeth and she laughs as he struggles. He blows a raspberry, the sound disgusting and childish, against the soft skin of her low belly when he succeeds. She arches her back, a beautiful bow of sinew and flesh and bone, to help him ease the leather down her hips, along the long line of her legs until they hit her high, laced boots. She laughs unhelpfully at him as he grumbles at this new obstacle.

“You could will them away,” he tells her seriously as she snickers at him. He leans down to undo a knot with his teeth just for the way it makes her breath catch. He carefully unlaces one boot with clever lips and tongue and teeth. When he looks up, Allura’s pupils have blown so wide that there is only the thinnest bit of blue around them. 

“Keep going,” she whispers, her voice a rasp so low and gravelly that he only recognizes the words through long familiarity.

Siâms grins at her with all his teeth until she huffs.

He watches her, the way her eyes track his every movement and her breath goes short, as he leans over her other boot. Keeps his gaze locked on her face as he undoes laces of her boot with his teeth. Gets the leather slick with his spit as he drags the laces through each grommet slow enough that the rasp of the lace through steel is a thin, whispering hiss. 

“Cheat,” she hisses at him as he pulls the boot free. “Vicious tease.”

He kisses the inside of her knee. “Learned it from you,” he croons because its true. Everything they know about sex and love and the slow slide of skin across skin they have learned from each other. “Blame yourself.”

Allura nearly sobs as he slides her breeches off her, the leather rasping over her smooth skin. Naked on the grass, her hair a silver veil spread in glory around her, she reaches for him. “Come _here_ ,” she demands. “ _Tease_.”

“You love me,” he tells her, smug, because it makes her bite at him with her vicious fangs and gasp as he slides to fit against him. Because it’s true.

“I will kill you,” she tells him as serious as the grave. “If you keep teasing me.”

It’s a filthy lie and they both know it.

He grins as he slides back up her body—kissing the sharp jut of her hip, the high arch of her ribs, the pert peak of her nipples—delighting in the cranky, demanding noises she makes.

“As my king commands,” he tells her sweetly as he fits himself against her. The noise she makes is somehow caught between petulant and demanding. He loves it. Grinding himself against her, he groans at the slick slide of his cock through her folds, and she clutches at his shoulders. He bends to her will. Fits himself against her. Presses his mouth to the pulse point of her throat just to feel the hummingbird quick beat of her heart. “Tell me,” he whispers against her skin, “how do you want me?”

Allura hitches a leg over his hip, dragging Siâms closer, fingers mean on his skin. “In me,” she commands, “now.”

Long familiarity with her body, with the sweat-slicked slide of his skin over hers, has him hitching his hips just _so_. They both shudder, pleasure racing through them like wine, as he slips inside her as easy as breathing.

Her fingers glide over his shoulders, along his back, to grip his hips mean and demanding. “Now,” she commands, “ _hard_.”

Siâms is helpless in the face of her commands. He drives himself into her, bites her shoulder to try to ground himself against the way her cunt clenches around him, hot and slick, and Allura tosses her head back with a wild laugh. Her fingers flex against his hips, directing him even as her legs wrap around his hips. She’s a glory underneath him.

“Siâms,” she hisses. Her hips move with his in a slow, practiced roll. “Siâms.”

It’s an old name. Long dead in the world Above but it still makes him tremble to hear it on her lips. In that tone. Said with her eyes full of lust and fire. Blood ignites like magnesium. Siâms gathers her to him, clutches her tight to his chest, groaning as she bites him. He gets a hand under her hips and lifts her just enough to make the slide of his cock a ruthless drive. Her mouth pops open in a perfect ‘o’ of pleasure, eyes wide and sightless, before he curls over her to bite at her sharp collarbones, her neck, nearly senseless with the way she fits around him.

Allura wraps fingers with the devil’s own strength in them around his arms and screams her pleasure. 

“Siâms,” she nearly shrieks, her voice fracturing around the syllables of his name. “Yes. That. _There_.”

Only the need to obey her slightest command keeps him from losing himself inside her at the sound of her voice, breathless and broken, gasping his name. He groans, near to lost in the heat and wet slide of her and kisses her. It’s more a messy, slick slide of lips and tongue, but it’s enough.

She grabs his head, fists clenching hard in his hair, kissing him like she could devour his soul through his mouth. 

There’s a moment, confusing and disorienting, when the world flips and she’s astride him. Allura’s eyes burn like the center of a star as she stares down at him. She braces herself with a hand at the center of his chest, right above his breastbone, and raises herself up until his cock nearly slides free. When she drops back down the glide is devastating. He arches underneath her, panting and desperate. 

She does it again, and again, and again.

“ _Allura_.” Her name is a plea and a prayer, and she answers it like she answers all his desperate needs. 

He wraps a hand around her slender wrist where her hand keeps him pinned as she rides him for her pleasure. He gasps when she leans forward, hair spilling like a veil around them, to kiss him. Sweat beads long her perfect skin, making it gleam like the sun at last light.

“Come for me,” she commands. Her voice is a broken thing, lower than the seven hells and growling like a wolf in the winter. “Siâms. _Now._ ”

He’s well-trained to meet even the slightest of her demands. He comes. The orgasm rolls over Siâms like a summer tide. An overwhelming wash of pleasure that makes the world spin down to the heat of her over him, the sweet sounds of her pleasure, the soft sweep of her hair over his chest. He gasps meaningless syllables as she continues to take her pleasure from him even as he trembles with oversensitivity.

Allura flings back her glorious mane of hair, broken bits of bone and crystal braided into her silver braids chiming in inhuman melody, as she shudders through her own release.

Siâms catches her, soft and sweet and slick with sweat, as she collapses. He sighs when she turns her head to kiss his throat, sweet as fresh snow, and smile with her bliss.

“Goblin King,” comes the voice of her Aboveground obsession. They both go still as statutes. Still as death. Allura leverages herself up to stare down at him, eyes wide. Siâms knows his expression of horrified dismay is a set opposite for her expression of glee.

“Goblin King!"

Allura smacks his shoulder, hard, with one hand as she stares at her viewing pool like she can’t quite believe what she’s watching. “Siâms,” she squeaks. “Do you hear him? Jamie!”

Siâms takes a second to study the unbearable blueness of the sky. It’s breathtaking. A perfect sweep of azure with only the barest hint of clouds. The Labyrinth so rarely enjoys bright, sunny days. The sun beats down upon them, merciless and scorching, and in another life Siâms would worry about turning the colour of fresh cooked lobster. 

Allura wiggles in his arms, still sweat-slicked and deliciously rumpled, and smacks his shoulder again. “ _Jamie!_ ”

It’s unfair, he thinks, that he doesn’t get warning of these types of days in advance. Someone should arrange a schedule for them. The Faerie Queen respects schedules, after all, so should days where everything he knows decides to upend itself.

“You are going to want your boots,” he says. “I think.” 

He opens his arms and she eels out of them with preternatural grace. They both gasp, a little, as his softening cock slides from her. It’s enough to make her pause to kiss him, breathless and delighted, before she scrambles for her scattered clothes. He rolls to his side to watch her fling her clothes back on, aided by magic and manic energy. 

“Siâms,” she says and smacks his flank. He buries his head in his arms and groans. She smacks his ass. “Up!”

“No,” he definitely does not whine. Allura smacks his ass three more times, in rapid succession, as much for the sound as to hurry him along. He makes a low noise of complaint as she laughs at him. He props his chin on his folded arms and frowns. “He won’t even get the words right,” Siâms complains. “Just watch. They never do these days.”

Allura settles her cloak of silk and owl feather and magic around her with a flourish. Her eyes are very bright. “He will,” she says with more conviction than Siâms thinks the little mortal deserves. “Just watch. He will.”

With a sigh that rattles up from his very toes, Siâms pulls himself into a lazy seat. The pool is a silvered, glowing thing ringed with marble statutes and wild-growing crystals. In its center is the object of Allura’s obsession, drawn up to his full, slender height, lips pulled back in a spiteful sneer. He’s pretty, Siâms will admit, even with such a vicious expression twisting his fine-boned features. He’s lovely to look at.

“Come and take this miserable boy far, far away from me,” the boy in the pool spits. 

“Ugh!” Allura yells, flinging her hands up in disgust. 

Siâms props an elbow on his knee and his chin on his fist, slouching with relief, as he watches his King stomp around her pool muttering darkly. “It doesn’t even start with ‘I wish,’ now does it?” He comments. “It’s not that difficult to wish someone away. ‘I wish the goblins would come and take you away right now.’ That’s not so hard, now is it?”

The look that Allura shoots him could kill a man at fifty paces. Fortunately, Siâms hasn’t had that little mortality problem in quite a time. They both ignore the ruckus reflected in her viewing pool in favor of making increasingly ridiculous faces at each other until Allura giggles and Siâms grins to have his King laughing again.

“I wish the goblins really _would_ come take you away,” the boy shouts, clear as the skies above. “Right _now_.”

The noise of horrified disbelief that crawls out of Siâms’ throat is deeply undignified. He sits up. “Huh,” he says. “Would you listen to that.”

“Pants,” Allura says with glee. “You are going to need pants!”

* * *

The words ring through the darkened theatre with more force than Lance’s voice, gone annoyingly high with his frustrated rage, should give them. There’s a beat of silence, as if the world held its breath waiting for a response, and then Keith blinks. Lance can see the way his lashes sweep down, a dark fan across his pale cheeks, as he processes Lance’s words. And then the fucker laughs.

Tosses his head back and _laughs_.

It’s a high, dismissive sound that makes Lance see red. The actors around them shift uncertainly. There’s always a certain degree of melodrama with any theatre production, but even Lance knows that they’ve blown so far past ridiculous temper tantrums they might be coming back around to deadly seriousness.

“Goblin King?” Keith repeats. “How can you be even remotely serious?”

Lance can feel a humiliated blush spread across his cheeks. Shiro shifts with discomfort next to him, doubtless trying to figure out how to diffuse the situation. He shoots his subdirector a quelling glare before turning that same baleful glower on the asshole pretending to be his lead actor. Keith tosses his head, laughter still bright on his face, and sneers.

“I wish the goblins really _would_ come take you away,” Lance snarls because never did learn any sort of moderation, “right now.”

“Because that worked out so well the first time you said it,” Keith says mockingly.

The light in the theatre goes strange and queer. Each mote of dust hanging in the air as if placed there individually by a careful, invisible hand. The spotlight on Keith becomes like a cage, everything else around him perfect pitch darkness. They stare at each other across the empty theatre. Lance can see his own uneasy confusion echoed in Keith’s eyes at the sudden change in atmosphere.

He almost expects it when dainty, dark hands reach into that pool of light followed by slender, dark arms encased in silk and leather. Keith’s eyes go huge and disbelieving as those delicate arms wind around his shoulders, pulling him back against a slim figure. Lance can barely make out her silhouette beneath the heavy cloak of feathers and her wild, tangled hair. Her eyes where she stares at him over Keith’s shoulder burn like the heart of a dying star.

He knows her. If he were _blind_ , he’d know who she is.

“He said the right words, this time,” the Goblin King purrs. Keith is very still in her arms, whatever stunted self-preservation instinct he has buried in his soul springing to life. Lance thinks he can see the whites of Keith’s eyes. “And here I am.”

She rests her chin on Keith’s shoulder and smiles. It’s a sharp-fanged, beautiful thing and Lance has never been so cold in his entire life. 

“Hello, my own,” she says simply as they stare at each other over a sea of empty seats. Lance feels like the universe has collapsed down to just the two of them even as Keith shivers in her grasp. “Hello.”

“Hello,” Lance repeats, because his mama raised him to be polite. “Your majesty.”

The Goblin King’s smile is soft and feral and impossibly fond though Lance knows of no reason why it should be. And then her attention is on Keith. She turns him this way and that, as if inspecting him for damages. 

“A little older than what is normally wished away to me,” she says thoughtfully. Keith watches her like he can’t believe what he’s seeing. He’s unnaturally pliant in her hands. Terrified, maybe, Lance thinks, or maybe just in shock. “But no hardship on the eyes.” She flashes her white-fanged smile at Lance again. “For you, my own, I will take him.”

“You’ll fucking _wh—_ ”

There’s an odd crackle in the darkness, like the sound of slowly breaking ice, and the Goblin King lightly presses her fingertips to the center of Keith’s chest. Keith sucks in a ragged breath. Shocked. Lance watches her flex her fingers ever so softly to send Keith tumbling backwards through the darkness that swallows him like the night sea.

When she looks back at him, eyes brilliant in her dark face framed by the silver spill of her wild hair, she looks very pleased with herself. 

It takes him a moment, but Lance finds his voice eventually. “Not that I don’t appreciate what you are doing, your, _ah!_ ” Lance jerks, startled, when she walks through the shadows, vanishing only to reappear and press herself along his back. Chill fingers find their way under his shirt, slim and clever, and dance up the ladder of his ribs. Cool lips press against his throat. He trembles, helpless. “Your majesty. I’d like my actor back,” he says, breathless, “if it’s all the same.”

“What is said is said,” she says against his throat. 

“But I didn’t mean it,” he gasps out. Lance knows he sounds like a little boy trying to avoid punishment, but he can’t find any other words.

“Oh,” she says, amusement heavy in her tone. “You didn’t?”

She sets her nails against his chest and drags them down, achingly slow, and he shudders with it. “Please,” he says, trying for an even tone. “Where is he?”

“You know very well where he is, my own.” Her laughter is gently mocking as she presses soft kisses against his throat. “He’s in my castle.”

“Give him back.” Lance tries for demanding but it comes out as a whispered plea with her delicate fangs against the soft skin of his throat. “Please. I didn’t mean it.”

“Forget about him,” she sighs. Every time Lance breathes, he can feel the slender line of her body pressed against his. “Go back to your plays and your stories. Your myths and poems. Forget.”

There’s not a chance in hell Lance can do that. His abuelo would rise from the grave and box his ears straight off his head if he tried. “I can’t do that.”

The force she uses to spin him around tears a high, feral sound of distress out of Lance’s throat. Something close to fear trips through him as she leans in close to him, so close he can smell the scent of her skin—fresh grass and sweet water and something deep and earthy—and see the tiny flecks of gold in her brilliant eyes. She studies him as they breathe in each other’s breath. Her hair is full of tiny braids, carved bone, and gleaming, broken crystal. In the darkness he can hear tiny movements as things small and quick dart about in the edges of his vision.

He might die here, tonight, trying to defy her.

“Do not defy me,” she hisses as if she can hear that thought. “You cannot win against me.”

Lance swallows hard, but he knows this story. He knows all her stories.

“I want to run the Labyrinth,” he says. 

She pulls away from him, thoughtful. Crossing her arms over her chest—and Lance tries really hard not to notice that because not the time, penis, not the time—she runs one sharp-taloned finger over lips. 

“That’s the way this works,” he demands, emboldened beyond reason. “Isn’t it? I get to run the Labyrinth to win him back?”

“Why do you want him?”

The question leaves him boggled. “I, uh,” he blinks at her and she smirks at him. “I need him. He’s my actor.”

She shrugs, unconcerned. “Find another.”

“I can’t just … let my mistake damn someone else.” He knows she’s not going to understand. There’s an element of mortal ethics that is simply not going to process for a creature of myth and magic. She reaches out to trace his cheek. The touch is so soft and fond it makes him blink and shiver. “He’s an obnoxious little shit, but I can’t.”

“So stubborn,” she says. “Just like I knew you would be.”

“You knew I’d be stubborn? I. What?” That’s a statement that makes negative sense no matter how he turns it around inside his head. “You knew me? Know me?”

Her laughter is high and ringing and utterly inhuman. It bounces around the empty space of the theatre and Lances pauses for a moment to wonder where Shiro is, where his actors are. Oh god, he may have damned them all in a fit of temper. 

“I have known you since you told your first story,” she says like she’s explaining the colour of stars. “I have known every iteration of you and waited.” Lance can only stare at her while he tries to fit those words into something that makes sense. The Goblin King smiles at him, so sweet it makes him shiver. “I would offer you a gift for you to forget him, but you’d turn me down, wouldn’t you?”

Lance nods, mute in his confusion.

The Goblin King’s smile grows larger, more beautiful and terrible, as she presses a slim hand against his chest to walk him backwards. The air goes odd around them, heavy and clinging, until a wind like howl of air through a subway tunnel bursts around him. He gasps, shielding his eyes, and she laughs at him. She spins him around as he’s still blinking, disoriented, and presses herself against him again.

“He’s there,” she says as she points past him. They stand on a high hill, bathed in a soft golden light. A vast maze of stone and high hedges and magic twists before them. At its center rises a castle that makes Lance’s head hurt to look at for very long. “Do you still want to go after him because of some ridiculous sense of fairness?”

“I have to,” he says numbly. “I can’t leave him.”

“Of course, you can’t,” she repeats, and Lance thinks she sounds pleased. He feels like he may have blundered into a trap, but he can’t see what it is. “You have twenty-six hours, my own.”

“I thought thirteen was traditional?” Lance asks before he brain can catch up with his mouth. Which, dammit, _mouth_.

The Goblin King only laughs. She spins away from, a swirl of feather and silk and silver hair. “Run quickly, my own, or I’ll keep you both,” the Goblin King calls even as her form morphs and shifts. Silver hair bleeding into snowy feathers, great blue eyes becoming huge and golden, slim shape disappearing behind feathers, beak, and talons. “The clock is ticking!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was planning on sitting on this for a while. But some of the misconceptions started rolling in and I figured I might as well nip that in the bud before they really got going.


	3. [Enter with flourish]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Siâms = James = Jamie
> 
> there is a reason for the old Welsh version of the name. I'm getting to it.

There’s a moment, a faintest of heartbeats, when Keith thinks that the Goblin King is going to kiss him. Like she’s gonna lean forward over the hand she’s got placed right over his heart like he’s hers to own and press those curving lips to his. Her eyes are very blue under the spotlights, glittering strangely, and he can’t place the look in them. Can’t _stand_ the look in them. He wants to turn away, but her eyes and the inscrutable expression in them keep him pinned in place.

Her fingers flex, ever so slightly, against his chest. Nails too sharp for that word prickle against his chest, even through his hoodie and tee shirt. 

He inhales slow, so slow, when she sighs.

Falling doesn’t feel like falling. 

The air goes odd and shivering around him as darkness closes over him. Keith is reminded suddenly of the one time one of the older boys in one of the group homes (the last one maybe? Second to last? He’d been older at least) had taken him skinny dipping in the quarry pond of the abandoned mine. It had been dangerous, forbidden, but the air conditioning in the rickety old house that managed to fit seven boys of various ages had completely collapsed in the face of the brutal heat of that summer. Regris had leaned into his space, smirking and challenging and hitting all of Keith’s buttons just _right_ , and asked if he wanted…? And yeah, _yeah_ , Keith had. The moon had been fat in the night sky, the only piece of illumination even miles outside of town, and the water the midnight colour of an oil slick. Its feeble light wholly inadequate to pierce the murky water when they had dived in. The water then, like the darkness now, had covered over his head and blocked out the world.

And now, just like that stolen night, coming back up to reality is a nasty shock.

Keith comes up sputtering and coughing, mouth full of a clear, silver water that tastes like starlight. It takes him several confused moments of flailing to get his feet underneath him and his legs functioning again. He shakes his head like a dog, water spraying everywhere, and coughs again. 

The sound of slow clapping drags his attention to the edge of the pool. A man sits there cross-legged, and each clap is heavy with sarcasm. How he manages to imbue such a simple gesture with so much emotion, Keith does not fucking know, but he’s offended. The man’s expression goes faintly amused, like Keith’s done a clever trick.

“Welcome to Labyrinth,” the man says without moving from his lazy seat. 

He is also, Keith notices distantly, completely naked. 

Keith’s head snaps to the side so quick it’s a miracle that he doesn’t sprain something in his neck. 

“And he’s shy,” the man says with an odd drawl. It’s like he expects words to have twice as many vowels in them as they actually do, and he’s determined to make up the difference. “That’s cute.”

“You’re, uh,” Keith tries not to sputter like a complete idiot. He fails. “Naked?”

“Unlike Allura,” the man says in that same dry tone, “I cannot control the flow of time. And she threw my pants only the gods know where.”

“There are public decency laws,” Keith grinds out as he stares at marble statute. It’s exquisitely done. Hands outstretched in supplication or grasping for something just out of reach that is desperately needed. The sculptor had caught the expression of dawning realization that whatever the subject is reaching for, she’ll never quite touch in perfect, aching detail. It’s not a pretty expression. It breaks his heart to look at it. 

The man laughs. Long and low and surprisingly melodic. Keith startles to hear it ring out behind him like church bells. He glances back out of reflex and then immediately snaps his head back around like his neck is made out of springs. Keith can feel the furious blush climb up his cheeks to the very tips of his ears. This is a dream, he decides. A stress dream where his subconscious has decided to be a complete fucker and go for public humiliation. That’s the only explanation for any of this.

 _(or,_ a small, desperate part of him that longs for things he should have given up years ago whispers, _or they are real. They’ve been under his feet all this time. Real. Real. Real. And could have come and stolen him away at any time. That time when Mr. McMurray had…. She could have…)_

Keith shakes his head to clear it.

Stress dreams, he tells himself, stress dreams. Maybe doubling up on credits isn’t the best idea he’s ever had.

“Decency laws?” The man repeats like he’s testing out the idea and finding it beyond hilarious. “You have met Allura, haven’t you? I doubt my king much cares for other people’s delicate sensibilities.”

He sounds both fond and exasperated.

“I have no idea who this Allura is or why I should care,” Keith snaps. Even in dreams, anger is good. He knows where he is with anger.

That earns him another of those ringing laughs. Keith’s never heard laughter like that, almost too pretty to be human, too pretty to be real, and if he hadn’t already half-convinced himself that this entire mess is a dream brought on by too much work and not enough hours in the day to do it in, that low, musical laugh would—maybe—convince him that he’s really _(here, finally, here)_ … gone completely fucking crazy.

“Goblin King?” The man asks. There’s a rustling noise behind him, light footsteps, and unease prickles all along his spine at the idea of having his back to anyone, much less a man who clearly is not entirely in command of all his faculties. “Lot of silver-white hair, leather, and magic?”

Keith blinks. The idea of the Goblin King having a _name_ , much less one as pretty and simple as _Allura_ seems … odd. It’s difficult to wrap his head around. 

“She has a name?” The question trips out of him and he groans internally. Even in stress dreams he’s a rambling idiot when presented with an attractive man. Keith blinks again. There is an idea that needs to be considered carefully. With hazard mitts. Long poles maybe. He tucks it away for later consideration. Or at least he _tries_ to tuck it away. Because there’s a long, lean body pressed up against his where he stands, just starting to shiver, in thigh-high water. Warm breath ghosts across his throat and now he’s shivering for entirely different reasons. Keith’s brain both tries to catch up and shut down all at once.

“All things have names,” the man says so low it’s almost a whisper, charming and seductive. “Are you going to tell me yours?”

“Keith,” he says automatically, because he doesn’t have any sort of defenses against attractive people pressing themselves against him and whispering in his ear like this is a normal sort of thing that normal sorts of people are expected to know how to deal with in a normal sort of manner.

Keith takes a moment to try to kick his brain back into gear.

The man laughs again. Keith trembles, just a little, against him.

“And you just hand over your name, just like that, to the first person who asks?” There’s something complicated going on in that question—in the way the man asks it—that Keith has way to decipher. It’s all pity and scorn and yet, somehow, incredibly soft. A gentleness in the derision that somehow leaves the feeling of being stripped clean. Keith fights the feeling of loss when the man steps away and turns him around. Keith finds himself staring into a pair of two-toned eyes. One a dark, midnight blue and the other a brilliant gold the colour new jewelry and the noonday sun. “You really do want to be stolen away, if you make it this easy.”

Something pangs, painfully, right under Keith’s ribs at that. He snarls on reflex.

“You _asked_ , asshole,” he bites out. “I was trying to be polite.”

Something complicated goes through those two-toned eyes. “Well. Manners do matter here, more than in most places, though we might need to do something about that attitude.”

Keith bares his teeth and tries very, very hard not to look down. “Do _you_ have a name, asshole?”

That gets him a thoughtful little head cock and a slow once over. “And why should I tell it to you?”

“Because I told you mine and I asked?” Keith retorts. 

This is where Keith expects the dream to unravel into surreal impressions. His dreams rarely last beyond vague images and sensations. But the man just narrows his eyes thoughtfully. Keith has never seen eyes like that. Flecks of gold in the eye with a deep violet iris, the golden eye shot through with a blue so dark it’s nearly purple—so inhumanly beautiful it makes him shiver. The self-delusion that this is just a dream, that he’ll wake up at any moment on his shitty futon with a raging hangover, is starting to slip. His subconscious is many, many things (most frequently: an incredible bitch with a need to make him suffer) but what it _isn’t_ , is into visually detailed dreams. 

“Siâms,” the man says coolly. The accent makes the name ring oddly in this strange garden with its marble sentinels. Keith sways where he stands as the man steps back. 

“What?” he says intelligently. That earns him a faintly pitying look. 

“My name,” comes the sharp response. The pitying sneer of derision reveals perfectly even teeth where Keith had honestly been expecting fangs. He’s disappointed, somehow. “You asked, and that’s the answer: James.”

“You aren’t afraid _I’ll_ use your name against you?” Keith asks. He’s more curious than offended. Allura and James. They are such normal names for such strange, half-wild people. He’d been expecting something else. Something with an excessive number of apostrophes maybe. 

James rolls his eyes. “You couldn’t conjure your way out of a breadbox with detailed instructions and access to Mab’s own circle.” 

“And you’re saying you could?” Keith asks. He’s trying for sarcastic, or at least angry—because he knows how to deal with people who look at him and expect rage—but it comes out more honestly curious than he intends. 

James just rolls his eyes again.

The water sloshes around their legs, silver and freezing, as James turns away and stalks towards the pool’s edge. Keith’s gaze snaps back to the statuary, but not before his mind gives him a detailed accounting of broad shoulders, long legs, and narrow hips. He tries not to think too hard about the bruises riding low on those hips in the shape of delicate fingers and fails. He tries not to think about how James got those bruises, so deep they’re nearly purple on his pale skin, and fails at that too. Keith can feel his cheeks flame with embarrassment. He’d never considered himself shy, but the casual, almost aggressive way James wanders around naked—his body a blatant, arrogant, display—catches at things in Keith he’d rather not consider too deeply. 

“Given how long I’ve been in the Labyrinth,” James says, and it takes Keith entirely too long to catch up to the conversation, “of course I can. I’d be bones at the bottom of an oubliette by now if I couldn’t.”

“An oublie—what?”

Keith watches the clouds make their lazy way across the sky and steadfastly ignores the sound of water lapping gently against the edge of the pool and the soft rustling steps of bare feet on grass. The sky is strange. A brilliant sort of blue normally only found in nostalgic animated films and fantasy novels. It feels like someone has reached out and turned the saturation levels up until the colour was almost a mockery of a summer sky. 

“A place where you throw away things you want to forget.” Keith has the impression of laughter. Wind plucks at his close, rippling the water, and Keith refuses to look away from the azure spill of the sky. “Are you going to stand in the pool until your runner finds you? I’d almost take you as an _gwragedd annwn_ standing there like that, afraid to leave the water’s embrace. Tell me, will you die if your feet are no longer touching the pool’s depths?”

Heat climbs up Keith’s neck. 

“No!”

James doesn’t say anything, just hums low in his throat, and Keith can feel the blush creep towards his ears. Keith starts slogging towards the shore even as his cheeks burn. The water clings to his legs. It feels as if he’s trying to move through a fierce current that drags along his body, threatening his balance with each unsteady step. His floundering, ungraceful progress towards the lip of the pool makes his face flame higher, humiliated and awkward.

He can’t find purchase on the slick marble of the pool’s edge and the jagged profusion of crystals, all in colours Keith’s pretty certain don’t normally occur in nature, threaten to rip his hands to shreds.

“You _are_ helpless, aren’t you?”

He scowls at the hand suddenly in front of his face because he’s too nervous to look at the body it’s connected to.

“I don’t need your help.”

A soft tongue click is the only warning he gets before he’s pulled out of the water in one smooth motion. 

“We both know that’s a lie,” James says while Keith is still trying to find his footing. James catches him when he stumbles, feet sliding across the grass, and sighs. “You are as helpless as a new born babe here and twice as noisy.”

“I didn’t ask you to help me.”

“No, I suppose you didn’t.” James flicks the water off him with a little gesture that manages to be deeply sarcastic in its obsequiousness. “Consider it an apology.”

Keith can’t help the way his gaze dips down when James walks away from him. He’s not sure he’s disappointed or something entirely else when rather than bare, bruised hips he finds sleek leather pants. Keith wants to be sarcastic about the clothing choice ( _leather_. _really._ ) but his tongue gets tangled up in his mouth. It’s somehow even more obscene to have James swan around in those ridiculous pants, no shirt, and bare feet. 

He doesn’t know where to look. Everything feels like an obscure joke that he can’t figure out and looking anywhere at James seems like a dangerous proposition. It leaves him feeling ten times as awkward as he normally feels and clumsy besides. He’s _never_ been clumsy.

“An apology for what?” He asks once he realizes that’s he’s been standing there silent in James’ grasp for entirely too long.

James cocks his head to the side, expression contemplative, and shrugs. “Who knows?”

That’s not an answer, but Keith has the sense that this is the best he’s going to get. He scowls on reflex and James laughs at him. He shrugs off James’ hand, feeling awkward and hot, and James lets him go with an odd little half-smile. 

“At least you found pants,” Keith spits. He feels spiteful with how off-center he feels. The corners of James’ lips twitch with some secret, closed off amusement before he turns away. “Hey!”

He gets not even a twitch in response. James plucks a shirt off one of the statutes where it hangs and shrugs into it. The cut of it seems strange, archaic, but it accents rather than hides the breadth of his shoulders, the narrowness of his hips, and Keith wonders if he’s going mad. He’d thought finally getting laid—and Shiro’d been nothing other than a considerate and _thorough_ lover—would have dampened his libido but apparently not. He’s aware, painfully, of every move and gesture James makes. Finds himself unable to keep from watching those narrow hips as James walks away.

It takes Keith a moment before it percolates through his higher brain functions that James isn’t just walking away, he’s _leaving_.

“Hey!” Keith yelps again and scrambles to follow. “James!”

That gets James to stop.

“That,” James says tightly, “is not my name.”

Keith blinks. “That’s what you said your name was.”

James scowls. “My name is _Siâms_ ,” he says. The vowels sound odd and the sibilants longer. There’s a musicality to the pronunciation that Keith instinctively knows he’s not going to be able to replicate. James waves a hand. “Not whatever mangled mess you just spluttered.”

“James,” Keith repeats spitefully. “Just like you said.”

That gets him an even more ferocious frown. “ _Siâms_ ,” James repeats. The name sounds exotic and strange in James’ mouth. Ancient. “Not that … mess.”

Keith rolls his eyes to hide his awkwardness. “James,” he says again just for the way it makes James’ eye twitch. “You’re just dressing it up.”

For a moment the expression James wears is unspeakably sad, and Keith has no idea why. “Is that the way they pronounce my name in this era? I had wondered.”

There’s something remote in James’ expression that makes him look, for a moment, as distant as the marble statuary. Keith has no metric to interpret that far off, untouchable look. 

“What?” Keith asks, but James is walking again—so quick his long, complicated plait sways with the force of his steps. “Hey! Wait!”

James does not, of course, wait. Keith scrambles to keep up, eeling around impossible statutes and ducking under their outstretched hands. He’s panting when he catches up to James, but at least some of that inscrutable, broken expression has worn off James’ face. 

James looks at him, a slow sweep up and down Keith’s form, and shakes his head. Keith feels, for no reason he can explain to himself, offended. It pisses him off.

“Can you at least tell me where we’re going?”

The ring of achingly beautiful statutes and verdant hedges opens up to the long, gentle slope of a hill. In the distance an impossible castle spears upwards into the sky. It gives the impression of an m.c. esher painting and hurts Keith’s head to look at it too long. It’s both fantastic and completely expected.

James quirks an odd little half-smile at him. “Can’t you guess?”

* * *

“I did not ask for this,” Lance gripes at the little fairy floating along after him. He’s hot, sticky, and a thin layer of dust coats every inch of him, from the very top of his head to the very tips of his toes. His skin crawls with the feeling. There has never been a time when he has been as filthy as he is in this very moment and, if he has anything to say about it, there will never come a time when he is this filthy again. This is, he thinks, a spectacular amount of shit and he’s been lied to. Fuck this hero nonsense for a can of beans; it’s bullshit. 

“Trust Shiro to do your casting for you, they said,” he continues as he trudges along. His voice pitches upwards as he recites. His expression is a glorious demonstration in all the ways a single man can look both enormously peeved and murderous. “He’s got great instincts, they said.”

Lance stops to wave his arms around expressively. “Bullshit,” he announces to the fairy who bobbles in the air in a manner that he takes to be an agreement. “Instincts for being an enormous pain in my ass maybe.”

The corridor of the labyrinth continues off into the distance, so far Lance swears he can see it arc with the curvature of the planet. The entire thing ripples like a desert mirage. He thinks fond thoughts of murder. Keith Kogane’s murder, specifically.

He kind of wants to pitch an enormous temper tantrum. Kick the walls and scream at the sky. Shriek about the enormous unfairness of it all. But that’s childish and he hasn’t let himself be reduced to that sort of explosion of emotions in a long, long time. Couple of months, at the very least. Taking in a deep breath he thinks of mindfulness and calm and centering his inner self. All the things that would make his yoga teacher very, very pleased with him.

And then he throws a punch at the wall.

For a moment Lance thinks that dehydration and sunstroke have gotten to him when he goes straight _through_ the bricks he’d been aiming at. He stumbles and smacks straight into the brick face with both hands up, so much farther away than he’d anticipated. Running his hands along the stone and moss, he manfully (is that gender-essentialist? It probably is; Pidge’d yell at him if they heard) ignores the slime and filth that coats his hands. Spinning around he stares the opening he’d managed to— literally!—trip through.

“Huh,” Lance says intelligently. “I did … not expect that.”

“Neither did I!” A new voice chirps.

Lance leans back against the moss-and-slime covered bricks, absolutely not giving a single fuck about the stains they leave across his back, because a girl with deep purple hair, dark eyes, and motherfucking _wings_ just dropped out of the air to crowd him up against the wall. He can feel the heat of her body as she boxes him in, like she runs several degrees hotter than base standard, and her breath smells like cinnamon and jasmine. 

“You’re a fairy.”

She makes a non-committal sound and waggles one hand back and forth. 

“Not really. Technically, I’m a higher goblin, but I really like the wings and the shape shifting and Jamie is a sucker. He’ll tell you he just didn’t want to listen to me whine, but really—Siâms is a sucker. Give him big sad puppy dog eyes and you’ll get him every time.”

“Noted.” The way she watches him swallow, like she’s thinking about taking a great gulping bite out of his throat, makes his heart go from ‘oh hello pretty girl’ to ‘oh shit gonna die’ in under thirty seconds. “Um?”

She pushes up against him. Normally Lance would be all about this. She’s beautiful, soft, and smells so sweet, but some malingering sense of self-preservation blares itself awake and forces him to catch her by her arms and hold her at careful arm’s length. Her hair is pulled into a high ponytail that moves with every gesture. It’s still long enough to spill across his hands where he holds her.

“So,” Lance says carefully. “You are beautiful and distracting and I think probably an enormously bad idea. If you want to tell me how to get through this labyrinth, I’d really appreciate it. If you want to be friends, that would be amazing, because who doesn’t need more friends? But anything else I think would be, um, bad?”

She pouts at him, all liquid eyes and soft curves.

“For me. Specially.”

The grin the higher goblin gets is both very pleased with herself and devious. She looks a bit like a cat that’s gotten into the cream. Lance half expects her to lick her chops. There’s a bit of wiggling around as she tries to snuggle up to him and he tries to keep distance for Jesus between them. It’s an untenable situation but fucked if he knows how to get out of it.

“I’m …,” Lance stops, his sense of self-preservation—now that it’s been roused—blares at him again. “Blue. What should I call you?”

“Oh,” she purrs as she tries to flatten herself against him again. His arms go out ramrod straight, shoving her nearly across the little corridor he’s stumbled into, and she huffs at him. “Aren’t _you_ clever. A name, but not one you’re attached to. And you know better than to ask me for my name. Clever, _clever_ , pretty thing. It’s no wonder the King wants you.”

A thrill runs right up Lance’s spine like slim fingers, which is, he thinks, probably not the smartest reaction to being told the King of the Goblins is actively trying to trap him in the Labyrinth. 

“If the King wants to keep me, wouldn’t it be smarter for you to not, erm….” Lance has no polite way to ask a very pretty girl with very sharp teeth to stop trying to sneak her hands under his clothes that isn’t rude or makes him sound like his abuela after she’s found a thesaurus and spent way too much time reading Edwardian romance novels. 

The girl grins with those razor teeth. She’s got a grill on her that would put a great white shark to shame behind those full red lips—oceanic and thoroughly intimidating.

“Defile you?” She offers sweetly. The word takes on a whole new set of connotations when someone with a grin as evil as that is saying it. She tries to finger walk her way down to his belt, but Lance manages to slide out of her grasp. She pouts. “Have my way with your body? The King won’t mind.”

Lance catches one dainty wrist. “I’m not certain I believe that,” he says. He’s got a strong suspicion that she’s laughing at him, which would be offensive except for the way she’s managed to trigger his flight or fight reflex and everything in his body is coming down hard on the ‘flight’ option. “But if you are so intent on having your wicked way with me, can I at least get the name I’ll be screaming?”

That gets her to pull back and Lance breathes a prayer of thanks to any saint that might be listening—with his luck, probably Saint Jude, patron of lost causes—as he scuttles along the wall until there’s enough space between them that he no longer feels like she’s trying to skin him out of his clothes like he’s a fish on a hook. She tilts her head to the side as she studies him. The sun brings out the deep purple shine to her hair and puts warm, golden undertones to her dark skin. She is thoroughly lovely, distracting, and almost certainly a trap for the wary.

“Nadia,” the girl says after some sort of internal debate. “You can call me Nadia.

Lance squints at her. “Did you just give me your actual name?”

“Yes?” That wicked grin is back. Nadia looks for all the world like the most shameless barracuda ever to saunter into Lance’s life. Running the Labyrinth is going to be exponentially more difficult if she’s going to be his constant companion during all of this.

He catches her hand as it starts to sneak towards the clasps of his clothes. 

“You know,” he says conversationally. “Where I come from, we have this little thing called _consent_.” Lance gambles. “It’s not very polite to pursue someone after they’ve made it clear that they are uninterested.” Nadia’s eyes go wide and she scoots back a respectful distance. Manners, Lance remembers, matter a lot to the fae. Thank fuck. “And aren’t you worried that _I’ll_ conjure with your name?”

Nadia shrugs one shoulder. “You’re mortal. And human.”

This doesn’t seem to have a helluva lot to do with the price of fish in Persepolis from where Lance is standing. His expression must give his thought process away because Nadia covers her mouth with one hand and snickers. She makes a little gesture that encompasses all of him. “The day that a mortal can conjure with _my_ name is the day that I give up my wings.”

There’s an odd moment where the air seems to be listening. A strange wind moves between them and seems to pluck her words up to toss them about like sea foam on the wind. They both shiver when it blows past. Lance thumbs the little silver beads of the rosary his abuela gave him and thinks of incense, salt, and votives filled with sharp-smelling alcohol. He gives Nadia a sweet smile.

“That sounded an awful lot like a dare.”

* * *

It doesn’t take Jamie long to find her. He’s almost through the door before Allura has time to fully change out of her talons-and-feathers form. He waves a hand through the cloud of feathers that surge up around his feet as he stomps across her throne room. The lesser goblins dance with the feathers tumbling in his wake. A dark-haired young man trails along in his wake, eyes wide and disbelieving. 

“You have a throne,” Jamie gripes at her instead of any proper greeting. “You could try sitting in it.”

Allura shrugs. This is an old argument and not one either of them is willing to concede any time soon. She simply does not care for the formalities and intricacies of the courts that seem to obsess Jamie. Besides, watching fae messengers stumble all over themselves to find the right way to address Plathu, Platt, Chulatt, and Chuchule when they thought the lesser goblins might be some form quadruple manifestation of the Labyrinth (and thus, somehow, the Goblin King) when they inevitably pile onto her throne as if it were their personal playpen is a thing she will stop finding hilarious on the far side of never. 

“The view is better here,” she tells her favorite Knight. Jamie huffs at her and then smacks at her boot until she curls her legs underneath her.

“Don’t think I didn’t notice you leaving me to tend the newest Wished Away,” he continues to gripe as he hauls himself up into the shadowed window nook she’s colonized for herself. “Thank you for that.”

“You’re welcome.”

She laughs when Jamie rolls his eyes at her expressively. Propping her chin in her hand, Allura studies said Wished Away at her leisure until he squirms, just a little, with embarrassed discomfort. “He already follows you around like a puppy,” she comments to Jamie without taking her eyes of their newest stolen prize. “It’s adorable.”

The scowl that paints the Wished Away’s fine-boned features is both hilarious and oddly charming. Allura hums a little spell and crooks her fingers at him. His eyes blow wide when a chill wind pushes him to the very edge of their little hidey-hole. She catches his chin with two fingers while he’s still stuttering over the sudden use of magic.

“Pretty, isn’t he?” Allura turns his face towards Jamie until he smacks her fingers away from their prize’s face. 

“Please try to act like you have some sense of propriety, rather than just making grabby hands at any damned thing that catches your eye.”

“Shan’t!”

“Greatest sorceress the goblins have ever seen and a complete spoiled child,” he tells the Wished Away in an aggrieved tone. “It’s disgraceful.”

Allura shoves him so he totters perilously on the ledge. Jamie catches himself and shoves her back, and then they are tussling like children in a hayloft. She enjoys, for a moment, the soft flush of victory that stains his cheeks when he manages to pin her—one arm across her shoulders to drag her back against his chest, a leg thrown over her thighs. Jamie squeaks adorably when she gets a good bite on soft skin of his inner arm. Wiggling in his grasp like an eel in a net, she flips around to sit astride his hips. He glowers. She smirks.

“You are a disgrace.”

She bops his nose. “I’m a goblin.”

“You’re a nightmare,” Jamie grouses just to be contrary. 

But he splays himself into a compliant sprawl of long limbs when Allura plucks at him—easy for her as she moves him as she likes. Jamie settles her so she lounges against him, using the spill of his body as her throne. His chest—the back; one arm, propped against his bent knee—the armrest; his lap—her seat. Allura sighs as she settles against him. 

“You love me,” she tells him from loose cage of his arms. Allura rests her cheek on Jamie’s shoulder to consider the Wished Away again, who watches them as if he doesn’t quite know what to make of their interaction. Fair enough, she and Jamie have been bosom companions almost longer than she can remember. He was the first to tumble into her court and she’ll never let him go.

“Welcome to my court,” she tells the Wished Away. Allura smiles as sweetly as she knows how and the Wished Away goes so pale, he could be mistaken as a misplaced statute from her gardens. “Either you will be a guest here for but a brief spell and remember us only in sweet dreams. Or!” And she can’t keep the delighted trill out of her voice, “you’ll be ours for all time. Wouldn’t that be nice?”

Jamie sighs so heavily to jostles her. “Ignore her dramatics, I’m sure your runner will do everything in their power to get you back.”

The Wished Away looks skeptical at that, and somehow, faintly, sad. “I don’t think so. He hates me.”

Allura can’t help the faint hum of interest at that. Jamie jostles her deliberately. 

She turns to look up at him from under her lashes as he frowns down at her.

“Stop that.”

She cocks her head at him.

“No.”

Allura cocks her head in the other direction, making all the bits and bobs the lesser goblins have braided into her hair chime sweetly. She blinks at him.

“Don’t meddle. That never works out well for anyone.”

Allura blows a raspberry on the side of Jamie’s neck as he grumbles at her and the Wished Away chokes on air. Jamie gently pushes her back and waggles his fingers towards the Wished Away where he stands looking thoroughly mortified to watch the pair of them. Ah well, he’ll adapt to their pace or the Labyrinth will eat him. Her domain is not kind upon the inflexible.

“Don’t you want your runner to try to get you back?” Allura asks, ignoring her Knight perfectly. Jamie sighs behind her. “Most do.”

“It’s not a question of wanting. Besides,” the Wished Away’s face twists with dislike. “That guy’s an asshole. He’s probably off celebrating or something.”

There’s a wealth of history packed into those words that makes them as bitter as old wounds. None that history, Allura thinks, has anything to do with her newest Wished Away or his reluctant runner. Jamie doesn’t stop her when she leans over his arms to run her fingers over one high cheekbone, fingertips catching on a tiny scar right at the corner of his eye, of the Wished Away. He doesn’t flinch.

“So certain of everyone and everything,” she says and even in her own ears it sounds sad. “Nothing can hurt you if you have everything ordered into its little box, is that it?”

He doesn’t answer but the hurt that suddenly blazes in his eyes is enough.

It’s not in her, it’s not her way, to hurt those who have been wished into her care, mistakenly or otherwise. Allura draws one of her crystal balls and lets it dance across her knuckles for a moment. The Wished Away watches it like a hawk. Relieved, she thinks, to have somewhere to look other than into her eyes and whatever he finds there. She rolls the little ball across her hands until it sits in the cradle of her palm. It turns thin as a soap bubble with her magic.

“Shall we make a little bet?”

“Allura,” Jamie warns. “Don’t.”

She ignores him favor of the way the Wished Away’s eyes go wide and then narrow into slits. He draws nearer, reluctant but caught by the image slowly unfurling within the center of the bubble, and chews on his bottom lip. Allura watches the scene inside the bubble reflected in his eyes.

“That’s Lance,” he says, startled, the naked disbelief in his tone almost hurts to hear. “Why is Lance in the Labyrinth?”

“Ah,” she sighs as Jamie swears softly behind her. “Is that his name? Thank you for that. The magic lets me watch him, but kept his true name from me,” the Wished Away goes pale, “and he’s come to fetch you back, naturally,” she makes the bubble dance in the air between them just for the hungry way his eyes track it, “bargained with me for the right to solve the Labyrinth. I offered him gifts to forget you and he rebuffed me.”

“He did?”

“He’s not the first to repent words said in anger, Ke— _Kitten_ ,” Jamie says tartly. Allura laughs at the sudden pet name even as the Wished Away’s face twists with dislike. So fastidious, her Knight, so careful to guard the secrets given to his care, even from her. Something sweet and courtly clinging to his manner even now. 

She twists to press a kiss to his brow, suddenly overcome with affection.

“My _name_ ,” the Wished Away says with carefully enunciated clarity, rage thick in his tone, “is _Keith_ , not _Kitten_.”

Jamie swears, low and filthy and terrible, while Allura laughs and laughs.

“Keith,” she says slowly, tasting the name. It feels like old sorrow, copper, and the tang of wild raspberries on her tongue—nostalgic and bittersweet. Allura can tell by the confused look in his eyes that he understands something has gone wrong, that he has made an error, but has no idea how. She smiles at him, all fangs, and repeats: “ _Keith_.”

Keith shivers as she repeats his name, eyes flickering from her to her knight. “James said your name is Allura, right?”

Allura rests her arms on Jamie’s bent knee and hums an agreement.

“So, now we all know each other’s names.” He says this defiantly, as if he could in any way present a challenge. It is horribly endearing. Like watching a kitten fluff itself up and hiss a threat at a wolf. 

“And do you have an idea what that means?” She wonders. Keith frowns at her--his scowl a caricature of ferocity as if it can hide the worry in his eyes.

“No,” Jamie answers. “No, he absolutely does not. So be nice.”

“I’m the Goblin King,” Allura says as she stretches in his arms until her toes push against the very edges of her boots. “I was not made to be _nice_.”

“What’s the bet?”

She blinks at Keith, derailed by the stubborn set of his jaw and nearly angry gaze. Not one to back down from a challenge, she decides, real or imagined, and not one to let an affront go. Allura calls up the dream bubble again and lets it hang heavy and pendulous between them. In it Lance—and there is a pleasant thing to know, the name of her favorite, her own—tries to squirm away from one of her higher goblin’s clever hands. Jamie groans _Nadia, dammit_ softly and Allura laughs again in delight. They are all such a trial for him.

Keith’s eyes track the exchange with an emotion Allura can scarce guess at, something caught between wonder and disdain.

“I wonder if I should even play such games with you—”

“You shouldn’t,” Jamie cuts in, “he’s an idiot.”

“ _Hey!_ ”

“—when you go and give me so many ways of tying you to the Labyrinth already. It seems unfair.”

“It _is_ unfair. Don’t go playing with him when he has no way of fighting back,” Jamie chides her. He jostles her, trying to break up the staring match between herself and Keith. His eyes are the oddest shade of blue, so dark they are nearly purple. She’s never seen a mortal with that shade of eyes before. 

She ignores Jamie. “A challenge, then, for the one who trusts no one. If you find your way out of the Labyrinth before the clock,” Allura waves a hand and an ancient, battered wooden clock with twenty six hours set about its scratched face flickers into existence, “runs out, then you can go free of this place—no strings, no ties, no promised obligations. You will stand virgin.”

Allura can see how Keith doesn’t understand the phrase as his brow wrinkles and he opens his mouth to protest. She holds up a hand to forestall him. “Any debts you incurred would be forgiven, but _only_ if you found your way out of the Labyrinth before Lance’s twenty-six hours to find his goal have run. Do you accept?”

Keith draws breath to agree and then pauses. Looks to Jamie. Whatever he sees this has him pausing, for a moment Allura thinks that he might balk or attempt to negotiate, but his expression firms. He nods, once, firmly. “I agree.”

Jamie sighs, deep and disappointed. Allura smiles and Keith blanches to see it.

“You have twenty-four hours then,” she says gently and then adds, because she is not nice, “ _kitten_.”

He scowls at her fit to be a thunderstorm, whirls on one foot and stalks off. 

“Didn’t even think to ask how this would affect his runner,” Jamie comments. He sounds sad and Allura cuddles next to him, regretful in her own way to be even tangential to something that causes him sorrow. “Not even for a moment.”

“You heard what he said, they aren’t friends.” She draws her knees up and holds one of her crystal balls before them, with a flick of her fingers she draws it apart like a baker dividing dough. In one Keith stalks down the long hallways of her castle, the lesser goblins giggling at his feet. In the other, Lance argues with the knockers of a pair of heavy doors. “One bound by obligation and duty. The other with distrust and fear.” Allura rests her cheek against James’ shoulder, sad because he is sad even though she was never going to do anything other than what she did. “I never intended to play fair.”

* * *

Keith turns the bargain Allura’d set in front of him over and over inside his head, looking for whatever trap she’d set in it, but for the life of him he can’t find any. But the way James'd stared at him, soft and disappointed, eats at him. The image of James' expression seared into his retinas so Keith sees it every time he closes his eyes. He’s only had Shiro look at him with that sort of gentle discontent, as if they knew of a bar that Keith could reach that he somehow failed to stretch towards. He’s left with the nagging feeling that he’s done something wrong and hates it.

“Kitten,” the lesser goblins sing, voices an odd lilting, squeaking mess of sound, “Kitten, come and play.”

“My _name_ is Ke—”

Keith bites down on his own tongue. Hard. He doesn’t need to fuck up a magic three times. Twice was enough, thank you.

“Kitten,” he chokes out, humiliation burning straight up his face like a brand. The lesser goblins titter. “And I can’t play with you. I have to find my way out of this castle.”

Four little bodies somehow materialize out of the sea of teeth and eyes and fur to regard him with an uncanny amount of intelligence in their beady little eyes.

“No one ever wants to get _out_ of the castle,” they chorus. “All the mortals always want to get in.”

“I’m not like the other mortals”—he sure as shit isn’t anything like that fuck up Lance—“and I need to get out of this place.” Something deep in his hind-brain wakes up and starts trying to beat his waking mind with a belated sense that maybe he shouldn’t be an asshole to the things with piranha teeth and questionable grasp on whole concept of hospitality. He hunkers down to their level. “I can’t play right now, but if you can help me find a way out of the castle, I can play with you later.”

“Liar!” Four little voices sing at once.

“What? No. I’m not lying”—(he is)—”I just … don’t have a lot of free time.”

It’s hard to read the facial expressions of bits of fur and attitude, but he thinks they’re relenting. They cluster up in a little mound of fluff that shivers and squeaks in a way that is flat alarming, before unspooling into recognizably distinct bodies again. Four little faces regard him with solemnness that Keith finds strangely adorable.

“Promise?”

Keith chews his bottom lip and remembers Allura’s bargain. If he finds his way out of this mess then he’s free and clear.

“Promise.”

They stand in a little clump of bodies, still oddly separate but not _that_ separate, like chemical bonds waiting to snap back into place, for a little while yet. Keith fights not to fidget. He knows somewhere in his bones that this is like … like a game of magical chicken. But he’s got the bad feeling that if he blinks first, they’ll eat him straight down to the weird little knife his mother’d left him. Leave no trace he’d ever existed at all.

He does not blink first.

“Follow us, Kitten,” they all chirp and then titter as he scowls at the nickname. 

“Kitten, kitten, little puss-in-boots,” they sing as the tide of lesser goblins surges along. He stumbles after them, little bodies hitting the backs of his calves and plucking at his bootlaces. He can barely keep track of where they drag him. Too afraid to take his eyes off the pulsing, dancing mess of bones and teeth and fluff that spill down the hallway to watch their progress. “Come to play a game. Come to chase a mouse. Come to play cat-and-mouse,” the little voices sing, turning queer and ominous as the hallways spiral in impossible directions. “Come to catch the mouse, but the. Mouse. Caught. _You. INSTEAD._ ”

Keith doesn’t scream when the hallways is plunged into darkness but it’s a near thing. His breath sounds loud in the darkness, heart hammering like it’ll beat its way right out of his ribs. He breathes out slow on a four count and then in slow on the same. Box breathing. A therapist at one of the group homes, young and new and without the shine worn off him yet, had taught Keith that. He still uses it sometimes.

“Hello?” He tries.

Light flickers in the distance. Keith grabs hold of his courage with both hands and starts walking towards it. He swallows hard, refuses to run, and counts each footstep as he walks towards the warm spill of light. Sound echoes oddly, as if he were in a huge cavern and not a narrow hallway. He tries not to think of it. The light grows gradually closer, a warm golden glow that fills the air like sunshine, and he is pathetically grateful.

When he stumbles into the light he has to fight not to sob with relief. For a moment, a long impossible moment, he’d been desperately terrified he’d end up walking towards a distant golden light until Allura or James came to find him. 

He tilts his face to the light and sighs. It feels like sunshine. It feels like waking up in Shiro’s bed with nothing to do for the entire day. He feels like it’s been ages, been an eon, since he woke up in Shiro’s bed feeling warm and sore in all the best ways with the sun just starting to move across the bed and Shiro’s body like a work of art across the sheets. 

Keith is surprised, distantly, that he misses that feeling and that moment like a physical lack as if his body has been denied a fundamental need.

He catches himself on a mirror—huge and ostentatious—as the surge of emotion, unexpected and unlooked for, steals his breath away.

“Keith?”

Keith freezes.

Takashi Shirogane is starting at him through a huge mirror that nearly reaches the ridiculous vaulted ceilings of Allura’s m.c. esher nightmare of a castle.

“Shiro?”

Keith can’t even wince at how pathetically small his voice sounds. This has to be a joke or a trap or some other sick manipulation, but Shiro’s eyes are widening with a shock that echoes his own. His wet bangs drip a line down his chin and Keith can see little tracks of water finding their way down the unfair cut of his abs. Keith blinks. Blinks again, but Shiro remains in the mirror, face blank with surprise, and dripping fresh from the shower. Keith has to throttle an entirely ill-timed surge of lust that rockets through him.

“Why are you _in my mirror_?” Shiro sounds like he thinks he’s going crazy and honestly Keith can relate way more than he’d like. He bites his bottom lip so hard that he thinks might bite through it as he tries to keep from giggling with hysterics.

“I don’t know? Stupid, weird magic bullshit?” Keith waves his arms around and then forces himself to stop because that’s way too much like Lance and fuck that guy. 

“So you. Lance,” Shiro stutters for a moment before his voice trails off. “That was real?”

Keith scrubs a hand over his face. “Seems to be? Did you see the woman? The one with the cloak of feather and all the hair and …” he tries to find the words to describe the way Allura effortlessly blended terror and beauty together and finds none. He drops his hands. “Did you see the woman?”

Shiro rubs the back of his head and Keith has to look anywhere but at him when it makes the long line of his obliques flex and catch the light. “I think so? It’s hard to remember.”

“Lance wishes me away to some, I don’t fucking know, faery sugar momma and you went home to take a shower?” Keith’s trying to be offended but he can’t keep the laughter out of his voice. If anyone had tried to tell him this story a day ago he’d’ve been waiting for the punch line.

“I didn’t!” Shiro starts and then laughs a little. “Yeah. I guess. Just trying to clear my head.”

“Well, I’m not exactly complaining if this is the view I get,” Keith says before his brain quite catches up. 

Surprise is a good look on Shiro. It makes his eyes blow wide and his mouth drop open in a perfect ‘o’ and Keith has a sudden, full-sensory memory of Shiro’s mouth forming a perfect circle and the tight, wet heat of his throat fluttering around Keith’s cock. All the air rushes from Keith with a breath that’s a little too shaky to hide what he’d just been thinking.

Shiro cocks his head to one side, surprise sliding away to cautious, curious heat. “Yeah?”

Keith wants to play it cool, wants to pretend like he’s got a script for this sort of thing, but the day has been so strange, so surreal that all his defenses are left in shambles. He ducks his head, blush curling up to his ears. “Yeah.”

“You’ve been kidnapped by the fae and _that’s_ what you think about?”

“Goblins, actually,” Keith says. He’d normally feel stung, but he’s too taken by the careful hunger that pares Shiro’s expression down into sharp lines. His face is all hard planes and full lips and Keith wishes he could reach through mirror to press their mouths together.

“Goblins,” Shiro echoes and then laughs. It makes the muscles of his low belly, just barely visible before they disappear under the towel Shiro has slung low around his hips, flex and coil. Keith wonders if it’s physically possible to feel one’s pupils dilate with lust. 

“Fuck, baby,” Shiro whispers, voice suddenly hoarse, “look at you.”

Keith looks down at himself—jeans ripped from the claws of the lesser goblins, hoodie half on, and gods only know what expression on his face—and can’t help the perplexed expression on his face. It has to translate as pure ‘???’ because Shiro laughs again, low and interested.

“Even when I had your cock in my mouth and was edging you half way into oblivion you didn’t look as turned on as you did a half second ago.”

A blush surges across Keith’s face so quickly it feels like he’s been suddenly struck down with scarlet fever or some other sort of debilitating disease that leaves one red and panting and overwrought. “Shut up,” he tries to snap but it comes out strangled. “You didn’t really,” Keith waves a hand at the mirror and Shiro’s state of undress like that would explain anything about anything, “get, you know, naked.”

Not that Keith had really minded. Introduced him to a whole new set of kinks that he hadn’t been aware were a _thing_ for him until Shiro’d trapped him, naked and wanting, while Shiro was still dressed and marched Keith right up to the edge of orgasm only to hold him over it for as long as Shiro had wanted. Rather the opposite really.

The smile that spreads across Shiro’s face is wicked and terrible and Keith wishes so hard his teeth hurt with it that he could crawl through the mirror to plaster himself against that body. 

Shiro leans back, hooks his thumbs on the edge of his towel where it hangs right at sharp curve of Shiro’s iliac furrow, and Keith’s mouth goes dry. The look on Shiro’s face, all sharp eyes and hunger, says he knows exactly what he’s doing to Keith and intends to continue until one or the both of them combust. “You wanted me naked?”

The sound Keith makes is strangled, gross, and doesn’t have even the faintest suggestion of words in it, but it makes Shiro grin with all his teeth. His thumbs dig a little deeper under the towel and he tugs at it gently. “Ask nice.”

 _Mean_. Somehow Keith had forgotten exactly how _mean_ Shiro could be. 

Keith backs up from the mirror and for a second Keith see the worry that snaps through Shiro’s eyes, like he thinks he’s pushed Keith too far—which, hah fucking hah, there’s no universe in which Shiro could push Keith too far—and Keith breathes out slow, careful breath. He’s being stupid. He’s being _beyond_ stupid. He’s in a magic castle full of creatures that’d chew the flesh off his bones and then suck out the marrow if they got half a chance and he’s about to … what? 

Keith closes his eyes and breathes out slow.

When he opens his eyes, Shiro’s nerves are stamped all across his face. “Drop the towel.”

He almost doesn’t recognize his own voice. It’s a punched out, gravel-fed wreck. Shiro inhales so sharply it makes all the muscles down his core work. It’s not _fair_ that all of that should be put on display and Keith be unable to touch. 

“Now, Takashi,” he grinds out. All the blood in his body pools between his legs and drags his rational thought with it. “Do it now.”

Shiro grins and does as ordered.

Keith rubs a hand over his mouth. Shiro’s body is a work of art and it’s criminal, monstrously unfair, that Keith is unable to worship it as god and nature demand. He wants to go to his knees and pray at the altar of Shiro’s body. Drag his mouth over every curve and line like a benediction. Put his hands everywhere in devotion. 

“Yeah?” Shiro looks shy, looks sweetly pleased, and Keith realizes with a jolt that he must have said some, or all, of that out loud. Oh well, embarrassment is for suckers who don’t have a man like Takashi Shirogane naked and willing to put on a show.

“Yeah,” Keith husks out. His voice is barely working, it’s all rusted edges and want. “So you’ll have to do it for me.”

 _Now_ Shiro’s pupils dilate. Blow so big that they eat all the lovely grey of his irises until all that’s left is the thinnest ring of colour. Keith can see how hard he swallows as his Adam’s apple bobs. “Oh,” Shiro whispers. “Um.”

Keith thinks about ordering Shiro to drop a hand to his cock and coax it to hardness. Thinks about telling him to wrap a hand around its length and stroke it quick and sure, but then he’s pretty sure if he did that things would be over way too quickly and he is not ready for things to be over.

“Are your nipples sensitive?” Keith hadn’t known his own were until Shiro’d put teeth to them and tugged until Keith had mewled and squirmed and now he wants to know if Shiro knew to do that because he’d had it done to _him_. A flush climbs up Shiro’s cheeks and spills down his chest. “I think we should check.”

Shiro swallows hard. Breathes out a shaking breath so slow Keith knows he’s counting out each second. And then ghosts a hand up his own chest to nipples, rolls one between two fingers, and shivers.

“You were mean with mine,” Keith rasps. His voice is a nightmare of wanting. “Mean and rough.”

Shiro’s eyes flutter closed and he tweaks his nipple softly.

“Takashi.” Keith had meant to be lightly scolding but it came as a hoarse demand. A shiver wracks Shiro harder this time and he tugs at his nipples until a whimper spills from his lips. “Good boy.”

That gets Shiro. Keith can see the way the tiny bit of praise hits him like a truck. His cock is stirring to full hardness, thick and long and curving slightly to the left. Keith wants his mouth on that cock _yesterday_ and he spiteful that distance and magic keep them apart.

“Do you want to be my good boy?” Keith whispers. He physically cannot get that question out any louder. Lust and his own mortified embarrassment over the entire idea strangle his voice in his throat. But it must sound sultry, like deliberate seduction, to Shiro because Keith can see Shiro gasp. See his cock twitch. See the flush of desire climb further down his chest. “You do.”

That seems like impossibility but he has the real, visible proof standing there swaying in the mirror. 

“Can you wrap your hand around your pretty cock, baby?”

Keith doesn’t know where his sense of shame has gone, but he sure as fuck does not miss it.

Shiro’s eyes flutter closed again as his hands drop.

“No, baby,” Keith says and Shiro _whines_. The thrill of power sings through him like a chemical chain reaction. He’s so hard it seems like a miracle his cock hasn’t broken the zipper of his jeans. “Keep one hand playing with your nipples. You were so mean with mine, you don’t get to be nice now.”

A shudder nearly doubles Shiro over and Keith seriously worries that he might fall, but Shiro widens his stance, braces, and gets a hand around himself while one hand stays playing with his nipples, rolling and tweaking them as he shivers and moans. Keith thinks neither one of them are going to last very long at this rate.

The sound of his zipper is very loud in the marble and silver hallway. Shiro’s eyes fly open and his gaze locks on Keith’s cock with a hunger that makes Keith shiver and sigh. 

“You like seeing this?” Keith asks. When he comes back to himself, he thinks distantly, he’s going to go bury himself in a deep hole at the center of the earth, but for right now he has neither shame nor mercy. He drags his cock back from his stomach and smiles at Shiro. He can feel how the smile has sharp edges. “You want it?”

“Fuck yes,” Shiro groans. “Feels so good in my mouth. Tastes perfect.”

Holy fucking shit, gods have mercy, Shiro is going to kill him. 

It takes several seconds to get his voice to work and his brain to come on line enough to say something to that. Shiro watches with an undisguised hunger as Keith runs his fingers up and down his length, catching some of the pre-cum at the slit and slicking it down his shaft. The way Shiro licks his lips sends memory and fire licking through Keith at double time. 

“Show me.” Keith’s voice fails. He wants Shiro to show him so much. Everything. How he touches himself when he’s alone. If he slicks fingers and opens himself up. Rocks on them while thinking about taking someone’s cock-- _Keith’s_ cock—deep inside himself. 

Keith must be babbling because Shiro gives another one of those full body shivers that rocks him from head to toe. “I’d take you, baby, god I’d take you so deep. Feel so good. Want it.”

There is no universe in which Keith can stand much more of this. He braces himself with one hand against the mirror and stares at Shiro as he shivers and moans and works a hand over himself with increasing need. “Shiro.” It comes out as a moan, a plea, and Shiro catches himself with one hand on his side of the mirror. Their hands layer over each other, palm to palm, and Keith struck again with spite at their distance. “Come on,” he whispers. “Show me.”

Shiro’s eyes are black and grey with need and bore straight into Keith’s soul. There’s something humbling, strips him bare and leaves him desperate, with the way Shiro stares at him as his orgasm ripples over him. It’s fire and easy and leaves him shaking as he comes messily all over the mirror. Shiro chokes out something, a high whine around the syllables of Keith’s name, and shudders as he comes.

It is the most gorgeous thing Keith’s ever seen.

He curls into the mirror, body trembling like he’s been running a race, and shouts when his shoulder starts to sink _into_ the mirror. He jerks back from the mirror, skittering backwards across the hallway like a crab, and the mirror boils out after him. Oozes silver and the shattered fractals of Shiro’s face caught in the moment of ecstasy.

Keith chokes on a scream as a something heavy and liquid pours out of the mirror frame after him like the slowest moving tide. Like it’s alive and following his body heat. It wraps around his foot and curls up his ankle when he kicks at it. Then Keith does scream, high and terrified, as it slithers up his legs. 

“ _Ewch yn ôl!_ ”

James grabs him under his armpits and heaves him free. Keith’s legs come clear of the silver still pouring from the mirror frame with a sick pop. Every mirror down hallway oozes silver, a rising tide that threatens to drown them both. James shoves Keith behind him, face twisted with fury, and makes an arcane symbol with both hands.

“ _Rydych chi'n meiddio_ ,” James hisses, a slippery horror of syllables. He looks like something out of a poetic edda, all whip cord strength, plaited hair, and fury. The silver of the mirrors slithers up to them, a slow undulation that defies euclidian geometry, a roiling mass that sings to them gently with obscene lyrics. Keith wants to hide from it. He scuttles further backward, nausea pressing against his mouth like a physical force, and James spits something that makes Keith’s ears ache and bleed to hear. There’s a screaming Keith’s mind refuses to make any sense of, a low unholy shriek from a thousand unseen mouths, and the silver rolls back on itself. It slithers away from them as if _it_ were suddenly afraid.

James follows after it like a hound baying for blood. It flees from him one undulating sea of magic and silver and thick liquid that moves like nothing should. When the silver has finally retreated, each and every sick and slithering drop, back into their frames, James shouts a word that makes the blood freeze in Keith’s veins.

He’d love to say he’s being poetic, but it honestly feels as if he’s suddenly been dipped in arctic waters, every part of him frozen. Hoarfrost climbs over the mirrors, cackling and snapping as it goes, until James is left standing in a hallway of mirrors painted with ice and frost. 

The look James gives him is disbelieving and darkly amused in equal measure.

“Now, little kitten,” he says slowly—and Keith is suddenly horribly aware that he’s got his jeans down around his hips, come drying on his belly, and missing a boot—“do you want to explain why you decided to feed the mirror of desire your own essence, or shall I guess?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> and we appear to be 3 for 3 on the porn. I have no idea if I'll be keeping that up. Probably?


	4. [they place themselves at every corner of the stage]

Døyr fe, døyr frender  
Døyr sjølv det sama  
men ordet om deg aldreg døyr  
vinn du et gjetord gjevt  
~~ _Helvegen_ by [Einar Selvik](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Znhna7g_n40)

 

“Stop laughing, Allura, it isn’t that funny.”

Allura buries her face in his stomach as she giggles—breathy little sounds that hitch at the ends—one dark little fist buried in his shirt. Siâms pokes her until she rolls in his lap, face flush with laughter and high spirts. He scowls. She giggles until she hiccups.

“He’s going to get himself eaten long before your favorite ever finds the castle, and then where will you be?”

Allura sighs out the last of her giggles with a soft little _eeee_ of mirth and wiggles in glee. “They brought him to the hall of mirrors! Oh, my clever, clever darlings. Look at how they stay within the lines of the Law by giving him the rope to hang himself!”

“They all but tied the noose’s knot, leading him to that place,” Siâms grouses. He has no expectation that Allura is actually paying him any sort of attention, but he lives in hope. Her hair spills all over his lap where she rests her head, grinning up at him with predatory amusement. 

“My court is very clever!” She announces with smug delight.

“Your court is a menace.”

She rolls enough to press lips to a bared sliver of his skin right about where his pants are slung low over his hips and blows a raspberry against it until he squirms. She bites him, just a little nip of fangs, and then grins while he’s dealing with the sudden rush of lust that zips through him.

“They will be very educational for him,” Allura announces with a conviction she absolutely should not have in Siâms’ humble opinion.

“Or they’ll be his death.” Siâms slouches further into the little window nook they’ve taken over. He doesn’t understand Allura’s hostility to chairs, but he indulges her all the same. Outside the Labyrinth storms—high winds bowing the hedges, rain sludging off the arching staircases of the castle, lightning crackles over the forests in melancholic symphony—as its King, keeper, jailer, lounges on his lap with languid mirth. “Even odds on that one.”

She reaches up to tangle her fingers in his hair, neatly unbraiding one plait while he frowns, and hums a thoughtful sound. “That could also be educational—death at the hands of creatures he scarce believes are real, but ultimately unhelpful.” His hair is nearly as dark as her fingers where she has a lock looped around her first knuckle. “If he dies, that voids the contest.”

Siâms watches as her mood turns contemplative. Outside the wind howls low and mournful over the Labyrinth as it plucks at the tree tops and sends the lesser goblins cowering into their dens. He wonders idly if—should Keith fall to the devious rapaciousness of the lesser goblins—his bones would go to the cobble stones, hands to the oubliette, his pretty purple eyes to the lichen. Siâms wonders if the Labyrinth would keep him, absorbing his parts into its endlessly changing form, or if it would forget him, as it has so many others, leaving him to become a nameless bit of wind whistling in the corners. 

A sad thought, one Siâms shakes away like a dog shedding water.

“You could order them to leave him be,” he offers.

Allura is, in so many respects, remarkable among the great goblins. But in one thing she is particularly remarkable: she interacts with her court of lesser goblins; plays silly games with them, sings to them until they sing back, teaches them riddles until they grow clever. More than any of the other greats, the regular goblins and fae bring her lesser goblins to house and protect and under her care they thrive. Creatures that were otherwise indistinguishable bits of fur and fangs grow distinct and devious under her attentions.

And she can command them as none other. For love of her, they listen and obey with startling results.

Allura stretches like a cat in a sunbeam as the storm raging outside her castle grows calm and still. She makes another thoughtful, noncommittal sound. She tugs on his hair, gently, and sighs.

“Or I could order you to watch over him.”

Siâms sputters. 

“I’ve never had to set guard to a Wished Away before,” she says thoughtfully as if she did not notice his baffled offense, “not even little Ina who had been so willful when she first arrived. But then, I’ve never had one who tries to run away all on his own. He is unique.”

Siâms swallows his offense with a sigh. She’s not paying him the slightest attention, making his outrage purely performative and pointless. 

“There was that one prince that’d wished away his entire kingdom,” he reminds her.

Allura grins at him, quick and fanged, and shakes her head. “Kingdoms are remarkable docile creatures when well cared for. And he did, for all his other failings, love his kingdom no matter how much he despised his father.”

He tangles his fingers in her hair—a mirror to her own gesture—and admires her pale silver curls wrapped around his pale fingers. “You miss Lotor still?”

“His poetry, perhaps.”

Siâms says nothing. Merely sits with her while she remembers pretty, powerful phrases that will never again be crafted within the world. 

Her Labyrinth is a crucible for its runners, a forge that hammers out their imperfections, if they can withstand it, and leaves them gleaming anew. Ready to face the bitter reality that they had previously tried to wish away or run from. But it leaves precious little room for anything else, and from Lotor it had demanded his poetry. She had given him an option, as she did all the runners, and Lotor’s had been to give up his kingdom, forget about all the responsibilities it placed upon him, and become a greater poet than he could possibly fathom.

Lotor had forsaken her and chosen his kingdom instead. Small wonder that, even centuries later, she misses his sweet turn of phrase.

But Siâms can only tolerate this self-indulgent melancholy for so long. He tweaks one of the little braids framing her face. “You were the one who let him think that the lives of all his subjects hung in the balance,” he scolds her, “you shouldn’t be surprised at the choice he made in the face of that.”

Allura scowls. “I thought he would see the trick of it.”

Her scowl deepens when he says nothing, merely quirks an eyebrow at her until she huffs at him.

She waves away the discussion with one hand. “Even still. Your kitten is no kingdom and will not stay docile and waiting like one.”

“I rather doubt he’s _mine_ ,” Siâms demurs. Allura makes a very rude noise that he ignores. “What would I even do with him?”

The grin that slathers itself all over her sharp-fanged mouth is entirely too knowing and full of terrible innuendo that he absolutely does not deserve. Siâms fits a hand over her mouth to keep whatever gods’ awful intimation regarding his person and the most recent Wished Away locked behind her teeth where it damned well belongs. She licks his palm, wet and filthy, until he squirms and releases her in disgust. Allura slides herself up into his lap with a sensuous slither that no mortal could ever hope to replicate and fits her hands into his hair. He lets her kiss him all over his face like a man receiving benediction.

“Never say I do not love you and grant you even the least of your desires,” she says sweetly. She’s three quarters smug as all hell and accelerating fast. He loves her like a man born without even the least sense of self-preservation.

“By saddling me with babysitting duties,” he replies because it is beneath both of them for him to pretend that he is nothing if not difficult. “I see how it is.”

She kisses the very tip of his nose, gentle, before licking his mouth from one side to another. It’s filthy, childish and Siâms fights with every fiber of his being to not make a terrible face over it. He fails and she cackles.

* * *

Lance huddles under the dubious protection of something that looks what would happen if a Douglas Fir got a little too frisky with a fern. He’s no botany major, but he’s pretty sure that nothing coniferous should have long, flowing fronds that end in spikes that could punch through heavy armor if applied with enough force. The wind rattles the tree tops and he has to dive into an awkward roll to avoid being skewered by one of the foot-long spikes masquerading as a pine needle.

“Fuck all of this,” he mutters as he tries to see through the downpour, “should’ve just left him to get turned into a goblin. It could only improve his miserable disposition. The fucker.”

Nadia, perching high above him on a thin branch that looks entirely to slender to support her weight, cackles. Lance sighs. Next time he wishes someone away to the Goblin King on accident he’s just gonna live with the consequences and move on. Face Shiro’s disappointed sulking with a stiff upper lip and a complete lack of sympathy for Shiro’s lonely dick. There’s got to be other pretty, feral boys with mullets and a distressing lack of anything approximating a sense of fashion for his sub-director to thirst after, right? Right! Next time, he’s strangling his impulse towards heroics like it’s the bastard child of an aging monarch and he’s a premier with designs on the throne.

“Are you going to wile away your hours huddled up like a bedraggled puppy that’s just discovered rain for the first time, Blue,” she calls down in a cheerful tone as if the sky hadn’t opened up to introduce them all to death via drowning, “or are you going to go find the heart of the Labyrinth?”

Something about that phrase tweaks his attention. Like it’s important somehow, like there’s a trick getting played that he’s only seeing the edges of.

He scoots out from under the tree (assuming it is, in fact, a tree and not, he doesn’t know, the bastard love child a nepenthes and a tree fern) a little bit and peers up at her through the sleeting rain. “Okay, that sounded nicely ominous,” he calls up to her. She is, he notes, desperately pretty even drenched to the bone with rain water and her hair plastered to her skinny shoulders in long coils. He’s spiteful. He’s pretty sure _he_ looks like a drowned rat someone decided to run through heavy wash cycle with a shoe. “You want to come down here and explain that ‘ _heart_ of the Labyrinth’ thing, or should I come up?”

“Oh,” Nadia coos. He thinks she maybe tried to flutter her eyelashes at him, but the rain has them clumped together and spiky. Water proof mascara she is definitely _not_ wearing. “Would you climb up to visit with me?”

“Fuck no,” Lance retorts. “I would fall the third branch up and snap my neck like a particularly brain-power impaired idiot. You’re the one with wings; you come down here.”

She laughs again. It’s an infectious sound, rising to lilting giggle at the end as if she knows a secret joke she’s dying to tell. Her wings flare—thin as onion paper and bleeding a rainbow of colors over the thin membrane like an oil slick over dark water—and she drops out of the tree like a stone. His breath catches in his throat to watch her hurtle towards the ground. Lance lunges to catch her before his brain quite catches up to what a monumentally stupid idea that is.

Nadia drops into his arms like she’s meant to fit there, like a puzzle piece looking into place. She winds her skinny arms around his neck and beams her barracuda smile at him. At his scowl her self-satisfied grin grows to something infinitely more smug and terrible, a horrible harbinger of her delight, and he has the overwhelming desire to find a particularly deep puddle to drown her in.

Lance jostles her and she squirms inside his hold to nip at his earlobes in a manner that he finds objectively disgusting and subjectively the hottest thing anyone with the serrated teeth of a megalodon has ever done to him. There’s clearly something wrong with him.

“Unhand me, hussy,” he demands as promptly as possible—or at least once his vision stops being composed primarily of stars and his hormones stop informing him of precisely how long it has been since anyone other than his own dearly beloved right hand has been intimate with him—and tries to wear his best stern expression. “I am on a _quest_.”

“You think that matters to me?”

He scowls for precisely three point five seconds and then gives it up in the face of Nadia’s supremely unconcerned delight with his discomfort. He sighs and jostles her again. She giggles when he bounces her. Lance is rapidly coming to the conclusion that Nadia being as shameless as three rabid ferrets in a fairy costume is going to be one of the fundamental facts of his existence in the Labyrinth. 

“You make this hero thing very difficult,” he tells her seriously, “I have the distinct impression you are not treating this with the gravitas it is due.”

Nadia kisses his nose. “I am treating it with precisely the right amount of gravitas,” she corrects gently. “For love of you Allura makes many concessions.”

“Yeah,” Lance says slowly with suspicion being the heaviest note in his three-part aria composed to his unrelenting skepticism towards Nadia’s blasé nature. He’s a theater major one semester short of graduation. He recognizes performativity when he sees it, and this is a girl putting on one helluva an act. He just can’t see why. “That’s a thing you should maybe explain.”

“I don’t see why I should.”

He raises an eyebrow at her. Nadia raises one back. There is a short, intense battle of skeptical eyebrow raising but he, being in possession of impeccably groomed brows, wins. 

Nadia blows out a breath so intense it puffs up her cheeks until she’s doing an adorable chipmunk impression. “We aren’t normally directed to impede the progress of runners, you know,” she tells him quietly. It’s as if a switch has been thrown. He’s not sure what exactly just happened and blinks at the sudden shift in attitude. “Allura rarely tells us to do _anything_ except maybe to not eat the fae messengers when they show up and even then, it’s more like a … suggestion. Polite request. But you,” Nadia bops his nose with one finger and then kisses it again when he goes slightly cross-eyed trying to track her movements, “you are an exception.”

“You’ve been told to slow me down?”

“Hinder, but not harm,” Nadia says like she’s reciting. “Slow, but do not stop.” 

“That does answer the question as to why you haven’t tied bricks around my legs and tossed me down a hole and then just called it a day.”

“Well, there is an oubliette in a couple more turns of the Labyrinth if you are into that sort of thing.”

Lance has a terrible feeling that he’s about to regret his next question, but it bubbles out of his mouth like the last dying gasps of a sailor still trying to reach for the siren drowning his silly ass. “Okay. I’ll bite”—Nadia waggles her eyebrows in an insinuating manner and he, because he was born without a functioning sense of self-preservation, waggles his back—”what do you mean by ‘into that’?”

“Hands,” Nadia says succinctly. “ _Lots_ of hands.”

Lance considers that and then shakes his head. “Not my kink.”

“No?”

This is, Lance feels, an impermissible deviation from the direction that he’d been trying to take the conversation. The way Nadia grins at him, teeth an oceanic horror behind full red lips, suggests she is well aware of how she has taken the conversation, removed the guardrails, and then flung it so far off the tracks the train of his thought may never recover. It is a catastrophic crash. The survivors are on their knees wailing and trying to pick the bodies out of the flaming wreck. He’d be upset, but honestly his own ADHD addled brain rarely adheres well to the niceties conversational structure and there’s something a little reassuring to find someone who’s jumped so far ahead of the track that she’s forgotten it even existed only to circle back like hunting band with the scent of fresh blood in their teeth.

He has maybe lost control of this metaphor.

Rain continues beat down on them as if the sky gods had decided, fuck it, let’s just turn all the taps at once and reenact the great flood since that was so much fun the first time around. She’s warm and soft and unholy smug in his arms. He squints at her suspiciously.

“Have you decided to try to distract me simply by throwing so much gods’ awful nonsense that my, frankly horribly limited and distractible, higher cognitive functions just shut down in self-defense.”

Nadia cocks her head. “I don’t know. Is it working?”

“No. Tell me what you mean by ‘heart of the Labyrinth.”

“Shan’t!”

They regard each other with the same sort of watchful predatoriness that Lance thinks the gunslingers at the O.K. Corral felt as they eyed each other with bitten off anticipation. He lets his hands slide lower. Her eyes narrow in suspicion, but she cuddles closer to him. A neat trick when her wings have a span proportional to a dragonfly and twice as pretty. There’s a moment longer where they exist just like that, cuddled close together to steal each other’s body heat in the blinding rain, but Lance has to go and ruin it because of course he does.

He gets his hands under Nadia’s loose shirt and finds the delicate sweep of ribs that is, on every girl he has ever known, wicked sensitive and ticklish besides. 

Nadia shrieks with offense and tries to eel out his grasp. He catches her with an ankle hooked neatly behind hers and they tumble into the mud. Lance, more through luck than any sort of reflex, manages to maintain control of their tussle as they go down. He dances his fingers up the ladder of her ribs, fingers finding sensitive places with a skill trained by extended battles with siblings, and grins at her.

“Tell me!”

She shakes her head even as she gasps with laughter.

Eventually he lets her go when the mud squelches around them with a thick, gross sound. It’s matted through her hair and smeared up his arms. _Eurgh_.

While he tries to figure out how to best clean himself off Nadia squirms her way free of him.

“You’re the clever runner, Blue,” she tells him. Lance glances up at where she sits—muddy and drenched but still lovely—in a sloppy cross-legged seat. “You need to figure it out.”

Then she vanishes as if she never existed at all. 

Lance blinks, mud sliding down his arms and soaking into the knees of his jeans where he kneels, at the empty space that once held one dragonfly-winged goblin. “Well,” he says with the air of a man who has had to deal with entirely too much bullshit for one three-hour span. “Shit.”

* * *

Even with James’ warning about the mirrors and all the ways they can lie to catch up a mortal soul, Keith can’t put out of his mind the image of _Shiro_ spread out and gorgeous and reaching for him in ways that make the blood in Keith’s veins catch on fire and boil. The sound of Shiro sighing his name echoes in his ears like the ringing of a fighter jet hitting the sound barrier. 

He knows he doesn’t have the time to go looking for that hallway and its seemingly endless line of mirrors—he’s on a strict deadline with time measured out by a mad girl with more power than compassion—but he _wants_ so badly its like an ache settling in his bones.

Self-control has never been his best virtue anyway.

Keith’s dimly aware that it takes him far less time than it should to find his way down that long, queerly lit hallway. It’s as if his body remembers the path even as his mind shies away for it. Or, and this is a far more unsettling thought, the castle reshapes itself around him to bring him—shivering and uncertain—to stand at the mouth of the hall of mirrors. 

He tries to ignore the distant sounds of laughter as he walks through the entry arch.

The mirrors ostentatious to the point of tackiness and ridiculously huge. Gilt and silver and onyx frames. Heavy filigree crawling along the edges of glass. Delicate etchings of woodland creatures, dying flowers, and arcane symbols crowding in close next to each other. Keith resists the urge to run his fingers along them. He might be impulsive, but he’s not suicidal. 

He’s ready, this time, for the way the hallway warps around him. It spins away from him in a seemingly endless spiral of marble steps and silent mirrors that never show his reflection. 

One mirror bleeds into the next. Each surface flat and grey, covered in a thin layer of ice rime, refusing to react to his presence. Whatever word James had shouted as he’d dragged Keith out of the silver liquid that’d poured out of the mirrors—each still showing Shiro’s face slack with pleasure in distorted fractals—kept each of them still and silent even when Keith stood so close his breath threatened to melt the hoarfrost along their surface.

All except one.

It’s a little thing, comparatively, only showing half of Keith’s body. Not so large that he could be dragged into it by the strength of magic and longing, but big enough that it still strikes him as excessive. The frame is simple—heavy black wood worked with gold filigree—and the surface ripples when he steps near it. 

Keith glances around, resists the urge to fidget like a schoolchild called to the front of the class, and then whispers: “Do you have a name?”

It feels beyond stupid to be asking inanimate objects for their names. Both because he feels like he’s tripped and fallen backwards into a Disney movie (if anything starts singing at him, he’s going to beat it with a brick) and because James’ blistering lecture about treating magical objects carelessly still rings in his ears. 

The entire surface of the mirror goes dark. Keith backs up. Slowly, as if drawn by an unsteady hand, the word ἱστορία fills the black surface, picked out in delicate lights.

“I … don’t speak that language.”

The silence seems, somehow, judgmental. As if Keith had failed some unknown test by failing to speak some long dead language.

“I’m sorry,” he tries, voice soft, turning the apology into an apology.

The word fades from the mirror’s surface as the light dims.

“Wait, um,” Keith flounders. Nothing in his physics course sequence had prepared him for sentient mirrors. “What are you?”

Laughter sounds in the distance again, high and tittering, and Keith’s shoulders hunch on reflex. A chill moves through him, like a corpse’s fingers dragging slowly down his spine, as the mirror’s glass goes a deep and glossy black, as if it had been carved from onyx.

“Maybe you could, uh,” Keith swallows hard, feeling dread catch in his throat like a fist choking him, “show me?”

The surface of the mirror ripples again, the entire surface moving like the tide coming in, before smoothing back out. It fills with swirling, glowing lights that makes Keith think of fireflies drifting over a pond. Slowly the surface resolves until Keith can make out an odd room—so long its corners are shrouded in shadows with high, arching ceilings and rough-hewn wooden pews marched down its length like soldiers. Glittering light spilling through stained glass windows paints the grey stone of the floor in remarkable blue and reds. A church, Keith realizes, done in medieval style.

A small boy, no older than eight, races in and slams shut a set of heavy doors and then flings down the heavy locking beam, using his entire body weight to activate the mechanism. He scrubs his mouth with the back of his hand as he backs away. His eyes are bright and wild as he stares at the door. Even from a distance Keith can see the whites all the way around his eyes like a spooked horse. Blood is smeared across the back of the boy’s hand when he drops it. 

Keith’s heart lodges itself in his throat like a stone set to choke him.

It’s James. Tiny, bruised and bleeding, with furious eyes, but definitely James. 

Keith sucks in a sharp breath. He has the feeling he’s watching something that he should not see. That he’s being let in on secret that he shouldn’t know.

The doors boom as something heavy hits it from the other side. They rattle on their hinges, but the massive beam locked across them holds. And Keith knows in his soul that they won’t hold forever. James—tiny with bird-frail bones and close-cropped hair—backs away even further. Keith watches as he rakes little hands through his hair and glares. Both his eyes are a deep, glorious blue, so dark they could be mistaken for black, and Keith wonders when James had gotten that one golden eye. Shouts ring out from the other side of the doors and James squeezes his eyes shut. It looks like he’s perilously close to tears.

Small hands pluck at the edges of his tunic—and what the fuck is James even wearing? He looks like he stumbled out of a renfair reenactment camp—as James’ mouth works like he’s going to either scream or vomit. The doors shake with impact. Someone, or a lot of someones, have found what sounds like a battering ram. James sucks in a deep breath.

Keith startles almost as badly as little baby James in the mirror when a soft chiming announces Allura’s appearance.

She’s even tinier than child James. Fragile limbs, enormous eyes, and a cloud of fine silver-white hair—she looks like she could be no older than very dubious eight or nine. Keith recognizes the massive cloak of feathers she wears, but on her tiny child frame it looks ridiculous and endearing rather than terrifying. A little girl playing dress up in her parents’ clothes. Keith watches with as much confusion as James when she spins a delighted circle, as if there’s too much energy in her tiny body and it can only be released by movement. 

Allura claps her hands when she spots him. James tries to back up out of her reach, but she moves lightning quick and catches one of his hands in both of hers.

“Hello, my own!” She chirps. Her voice is a single high, clear note of joy. “Hello!”

James tugs on his trapped hand and frowns at her. “I swore no fealty to you.”

Contrary to every logical explanation, Keith understands the words that trip out of James’ mouth—heavy on the sliding vowels and high, trilling rs—the words shift inside his head like a puzzle coming together until they make sense. If he tries to think about the individual syllables of them—vowels a slip-sliding mash of musicality he’s never heard before—the words break down until they are a foreign language Keith’s pretty certain has been long forgotten by the world. But when he _doesn’t_ think about them, just lets the words flow over him like music, he finds he understands them as naturally as breathing.

Keith is pretty good at not thinking about things.

It doesn’t seem to matter to the little Allura in the mirror in any case. She laughs, the sound inhuman and beautiful, before tugging on James’ trapped hand. There’s a moment, brief and fleeting, when Keith thinks she glances _through_ the mirror to wink at him. Not at James, who slowly grows ever more frustrated the longer she keeps a tight hold of him, but at _Keith_ who stands outside the mirror and that space and that time. In the mirror Allura’s sly grin grows wider as Keith grapples with the concept.

The entire idea hurts Keith’s head and he puts it away for later inspection.

“But you were going to say the words!” Allura says. She cuddles up to James, who goes an immediate bright and brilliant red, and smiles sweetly for all it flashes tiny white fangs. She’s the perfect image of a happy baby predator cuddled up to the child version of the strange and terrifying man keeping him captive in this castle of mirrors and magic. “You were going to say your _right_ words.”

“How did you know?” It’d be comical the way James gapes at her if his voice didn’t sound so shattered.

Allura laughs again. It’s the bright, clear sound of a child who has never been hurt, never once in all their life, and Keith knows the broken look of envy that snaps across James’ face like he knows every letter of his own name. Allura squeezes James’ hand, apparently oblivious, and grins.

“I’m the Goblin King! Of course, I know.”

“That’s not possible.” The complete conviction in James’ voice strikes Keith as incredibly funny and he catches himself hiding a grin even though there’s no one there to see it. James’ expression of sheer offense at the idea is both deeply familiar and hilarious when scrunched down onto a child’s tiny features. The look of horrified insult grows when Allura sticks out her tongue. “You can’t be.”

“Why not?”

“Because you’re a child!”

“ _You’re_ a child!”

“I’m heir to the throne of Gwynedd! I am no _child_.”

The two children glare at each other.

Allura breaks the contest first, laughing clear and sweet, to swing James’ captured hand with both of her and beam. It’s hard for Keith to reconcile this sweet, bubbling child with the terrifying creature that has stolen him away. 

“Then say your words, sweet prince, and tell me who you want to wish away,” Allura chirps with every appearance of innocence, as if stealing away mortal children is nothing more than a game between children. “If you repent it, you can run the Labyrinth, but I’ll win, you know.”

James scowls at her. It’s almost funny the way offense twists his child features, but the thunderous crack of the doors finally giving way cuts short the sweet scene. Both children huddle away from the men that spill into their sanctuary. James catches Allura by her shoulders and shoves her behind him. She clutches at his arm, eyes huge, as a massive man that has a face that echoes James’ features if seen through a distorted mirror. An uncle, Keith thinks, or cousin. He’s heavily armored, bearded, with long muddy brown hair caught up in complicated plaits. He stalks towards James with the slow, rolling stride of a man who accustomed to getting his own way. James scuttles backward, careful to keep himself between Allura and the strange man, until the children hit the edge of the alter. 

James draws a short knife and holds it front of him. Even through the mirror Keith can see how his hand shakes. He looks so small, so fragile against the advancing bulk of his kinsman. Nothing more than a wisp of a boy.

Keith can feel his hands curl into tight fists. He doesn’t want to see this. He knows it’s going to be nothing but terrible.

“Oh, hark it, friends,” the man says in a horror of slippery syllables made worse by his soft, vicious tone. “My little cousin offers me harm.”

“Stay back, Merfyn,” James demands. 

“You won’t come here to greet me, Jamie?” Merfyn asks. The look on the man’s face is terrible in its gentle malice. “Your favorite cousin?”

Something like a scream or a sob or a shrill shriek of terror tears itself out of James’ mouth. “You killed my father, you lying bastard! You said it was the Northmen, but I _know!_ ”

“Hark it,” Merfyn says again, soft and gentle as slow acting poison. “My cousin levies such charges in the house of God.” Allura screeches when Merfyn moves, snake fast and vicious, to grab James by his hair. He plucks the knife out of James’ hand as easy as a man might pick a ripe peach from a tree and throws it clattering to the corners of the hall. An awful stillness fills the mirror. James whines, high and terrified, when Merfyn drags him up, nearly off his feet, by the fist in his hair. “Where is your proof, little cousin? If you have none, I’ll have your throat slit for a liar.”

“You were going to slit my throat anyway,” James says. His voice is a rasping thing of rage. Keith’d expected it to come out wet or frightened, but James just sounds murderous. He sounds like he’d rip out his cousin’s heart with his teeth if he could just get the leverage. “Like you did my brothers.”

His cousin laughs, shakes with it, and James is tossed about by the grip Merfyn keeps in his hair. “Clever little lad. Such a pity you were born as dark as your father. I’ll miss you, boy, I will. But I’ll have the throne even if it means wading through clan Cunedda’s blood.”

“Say your words!” Allura’s scream cuts through everything—Merfyn’s gently poisonous voice, the rattle and thump of heavily armored men moving into position, James’ high, pained whimpers—like a hawk’s hunting call. “Jamie, say your right words!”

It seems Merfyn notices Allura for the first time with her huge dark eyes, pointed ears, and cloak of feathers. As one the men pull back from her. It almost looks like the tide pulling back from the short as the men jostle and shudder backwards, their armor a nightmare rattle of metal and leather. Some cross their chests at the sight of her. 

“ _Tylwyth Teg_ ,” Merfyn breathes, and then jerks James forward to stare down at him. “You called down one of _them_? Sorcerous welp!”

The hiss of swords leaving their scabbards rips through air and for a moment Keith forgets to breathe entirely, convinced he’s going to watch a pair of children die in some ancient coup.

“Goblin King!” James’ voice is little more than a pained whisper, but it rings through that glittering space. “I wish the goblins would come and take me away _right now_.”

Allura laughs, high and hysterical, before vanishing. She reappears behind James in whirl of feathers. Merfyn releases his hold on James as if burned when Allura lays one dark little hand against the man’s wrist. She clasps James to her like a child with a teddy bear and glares at the men. There’s a crack like a bullwhip snapping and then Merfyn, the ring of men—hulking and sweating—and Keith—outside the mirror with a hand pressed against his mouth—are all staring at an empty space.

Keith rubs his mouth as the mirror slowly goes dark. He doesn’t know what to think, mind as blank as fresh winter snow, doesn’t know how to process any of this.

James had wished _himself_ away.

* * *

The Labyrinth slides around her in a parody of a lover’s caress as Allura stalks its silent pathways. Time and space are but faint suggestions, poorly marked sign posts, for her passage as she wanders with a whispering wind as her companion. Her magic feeds the Labyrinth. Her deep wells of power, it’s lifeblood. With each of her breaths, the Labyrinth starts anew. It’s endless corridors, her mercurial whims. There is no place in the Labyrinth that is foreign to her and she will always find herself at home with in its clutches. It will never let her go; she knows this.

It spills before her like a gift and she can’t help but love it even as it drinks in her magic like a leech with a fresh vein. Allura walks its shadowed paths like a fox eluding a hunter, thinking little beyond the need to be gone from the castle and resisting the urge to think of _why_. Nothing as simple as boredom, or the restless sort of melancholy that comes from an excess of power and no borders to contain it. But rather an itching sort of discomfort as if she looked for something missing—a book, a lyric of a song, a missing key—and found it always just out of her reach.

The restlessness chases her from end to end of her domain. 

The eye lichen turns to watch her sweep through the stone corridor as the fairies bow and the bookworms cower in their homes. The Fire Gang sings to her, throwing their heads high enough to mug funny faces at her as she walks the ramparts just to make her laugh. They squeak with faux-outrage when she catches their heads and throws them far into their forest before their bodies race after their laughing, bouncing heads. Allura wanders the hedge maze for a spell as the Wiseman murmurs indistinct platitudes that masquerade as wisdom while his hat mocks her and him for their foolishness. (She avoids the Bog of Stench for obvious reasons.) The enchanted forest unravels moss covered pathways for her as her most loyal knight keeps pace with her, regaling her with tales of his mighty defense of her realm.

“Sir Coran,” she sighs as he runs off again after his recalcitrant steed.

“Red! Get back here at _once!_ You are being very rude to our lord and liege!”

“Sir Coran,” she tries again as the man chases his monstrous mount around an even more monstrous tree.

“This is not behavior becoming a noble steed! Come down from there!”

Allura reaches a hand out as if she might stop the bit of farce unfolding before her. There is, of course, nothing she can do, so her hand just hangs in space until she drops it with the vague sense that she may have accidently walked into a comedy routine that has not yet been perfected. Red, a heavy-set mountain lion that’s managed to shed all of its battle barding, heaves itself higher up the tree and hisses. Sir Coran hisses straight back. Allura sighs.

“Come back here this instant or I am never feeding you again!”

Red’s ears, flattened to its massive skull, flicker forward like radars. It slowly starts to slink down the tree, reluctance and dismay in every gesture. It looks remarkably like a chagrined child despite being several hundred pounds of lethal feline.

“That’s better,” Sir Coran says with a pleased toss of his head. 

Allura thinks this might be putting the cart a bit before the (fanged, obstinate) horse. “Sir Coran,” she tries again. “I appreciate the gesture, but—”

“Good lady!” Barks Coran. “My gentle King”—( _no one_ but Coran calls her ‘gentle’ anything, much less a gentle king, and it charms Allura every time)—“it is not fitting your station that you should walk the Labyrinth unattended. My noble steed and I shall walk with you to the very gates of Hell!”

This is seems excessive to Allura, but before she gets a chance to express her skepticism, Red flattens its ears once again, tail thrashing side to side, and then jumps from the trunk of the great banyan tree to a hulking conifer. Red hisses in defiance as Sir Coran shouts after it. Allura watches in bemusement as her loyal knight goes tearing after his steed, shouting a strange mix of admonishments and plaintive entreaties. The forest goes slowly still as their ruckus fades into the distance. 

She resettles her cloak around her shoulders, the feathers of her cloak shifting into place, and breathes in the earthy smell of the forest.

The Labyrinth sighs as she breathes out, a flexing of the world, and when she steps forward a green road unfurls before her like a ribbon unspooling itself across a cutting floor. 

She may not have asked to become the Goblin King, did not ask for the power building in her blood like water behind a dam, but she doesn’t hate it.

It takes her longer than she would like to recognize the sounds of running water, the happy trickle of a slow-moving stream over rocks, and she follows it out of idle curiosity. The Labyrinth rarely remains the same—the static sort of consistency that lends itself maps is a thing of the Aboveground and fae magic, so brittle and diamond hard that it shatters if the right torque is applied—but rarely does her realm form for itself something entirely new. 

The forest turns lushly green around her, the smell of night-blooming flowers and loam heavy in the air, as she follows the ever-narrowing green road. She feels an unfamiliar tremor of uncertainty in her breast. Anticipating sits heavy in her mouth in a way it has not in centuries. As she pushes aside ferns topped with wild blooming roses, hedges filled with tiny flowers carefully unfurling delicate white petals, and vines that smell of honey and sage, she feels a bit like the maidens in the poems Jamie likes to read. Uncertain and impetuous in a new land. 

The Labyrinth has never been _new_ to her before. 

The fairy tale ambiance, however, cannot withstand the steady, furious tide of profanity that floats on the wind like a leaf on a quick moving stream. She grins with delight. It is _filthy_. And inventive! She wants to spin place and wiggle her toes at the sudden glee the litany of complaints woven through with complicated metaphor instills in her.

Lance stands in the middle of the waterfall’s pool, water up to his narrow hips, scrubbing furiously at his clothes. The air, Allura thinks, should blister around him at the strength of his swearing. It should, by all rights, scorch her eyebrows right off her face with its vitriol. The water moves in gentle eddies, disturbed by his energetic endeavors, and clings to his slender chest. Allura leans against a tree just for a moment to enjoy the pretty view. He’s as naked as naiad, droplets of water highlighting his lean muscles and putting delicate highlights to his golden skin. He looks, Allura thinks, very like some young god of summer. 

“That is the most inventive use of language, my own,” she chirps as he scowls at his muddy garments. “What an impressive demonstration of the versatility of the word ‘fuck’!”

Lance glances over his shoulder, sees her standing on the edge of the pool, turns an interesting shade of purple, and dives under the water with a distressed squawk that sounds not unlike an unhappy duck being strangled. 

“Your majesty!”

“Oh,” she says as she discovers, quite surprised with herself, that she dislikes formality from him, “you can call me Allura.”

He hasn’t seemed to realize that the water of the pool is so gloriously clear that she can see the tiny fish clustering around his toes in contemplation. His skin is a wonderful golden brown like the harvest sun through sorghum or perhaps late season barley. She wonders, idly, if it would taste sweet if she licked it. She asks and the noises that burbles out of him is, to her unending delight, like the death rattle of a goose. He watches, with wonder and terror and a growing hunger, as she reaches for the clasp of her cloak.

“Lance,” she says, just to taste his name on her tongue. It’s sweet, like new spring strawberries and the first racking of summer mead.

He startles to her his name, his expression growing thunderous. “Who told you my name? I sure as fuck didn’t.” He seems to recall himself and his manners all at once, eyes wide. “I mean. Your majesty.”

“Allura.”

“Right,” Lance says quietly as she pulls the laces through her shirt. His eyes have got dark and steadily hungrier as he watches her, as if he’s been starved for days and she is laying before him a feast one delicate dish by delicate dish.

“And your little actor told me.”

He makes a face. “Of course, that idiot did.”

Allura can’t help but laugh at his resigned annoyance. “He’s an innocent, that one.”

“He’s a _fucking_ idiot.” Lance tosses his hands up as he gets caught in the throws of irritation. He forgets, entirely, that he stands naked with his clothes a sodden mass slowly sinking to the rocky floor of the pool. “Miserable little shit probably thought he could, I don’t fucking know, punch his way out of things. Dumb fucker is gonna get himself straight up eaten before I can rescue him and then I’ll have to deal with Shiro’s disappointed face. There should be _laws_ against Shiro’s disappointed pout. It’s not fair.”

“You say that frequently, my own,” Allura comments more to hear herself speak and hear him answer in return that to say anything of note. She’s pleased with the way he watches her peel down her breeches. Hunger and trepidation war in his expression. “I do wonder what your basis of comparison is.”

He swallows hard as Allura slides into the pool. He could be a statute in the middle of the water, only betrayed by the frantic rise and fall of his lean chest. “You’re majesty?”

She frowns at him.

“Allura,” he corrects with a crooked smile. He looks like a man who does not understand what is going on around him but is gamely trying to soldier on. She waits to see if he’ll continue on with his statement after her name, but he seems to have forgotten everything that had been in his head not but a half second before.

She likes that he keeps his hands still at his side as she wades through the clear water to stand before him. Lance keeps his eyes fixed to hers with laser focus. When she finally reaches him and they stand a mere breath away from each other, Lance’s hands twitch.

“Allura?”

The water is far too clear to afford him any sort of modesty. She can see how he stirs to attention, the slow flush of arousal dripping down his body, as she ghosts light fingers over his skin. His eyes flutter shut when she stands before him as if overwhelmed, breath going short as his hands clench into fists at his sides. She pecks his mouth, a delicate little press of lips to lips, and he sighs into the kiss. He whines, a thoroughly involuntary reflex from the way he sways after her, when she pulls away.

“Yes?” It’s both an answer to his call and a request. She knows he knows this from the way he swallows hard and disbelieving.

“I don’t know what the fuck I did to deserve this”—he’s babbling and she, against her better judgement, finds this hilariously adorable—”but yes, yes, holy fuck yes.”

He squeaks in manner that makes her warm with tender affection and amusement when she wraps a hand around him, thoughtful and curious. She is far from inexperienced, but all her experience has revolved, until this moment, around a solitary point. Lance shudders, full body, when she slides her hand up his shaft, tightening at the very tip. He’s a satisfying weight in her hand. His cock is as lovely as the rest of him, long and lean with a dusky golden color growing to pleasing rose at the tip. When she tells him this his blush deepens, but his confidence seems to recover.

“If we try to do this here,” he says unwarrantedly serious, “we are going to drown and die the two stupidest deaths known to mankind.”

Allura pecks his lips again for the way it makes him go slightly cross-eyed. “I will not drown.”

“Right,” Lance says slowly, breathy with the way her hand works him, but still sarcastic. “Immortal. Unfortunately, some of us still have that little mortality problem and, uh, will absolutely drown because we are not in fact mermen. Though that would be really cool, the whole merman thing, though how would sex work? Would you—oooh, hello, I just want to point out that my cock is not in fact a leash.”

But he follows her, surprisingly docile, as she leads him out of the pool—step by step they mirror each other—even as his eyes heat. The noise that rumbles out of him is a wonderful mix of wanting and demanding. Allura promptly resolves to hear more of that sound as soon as possible. She thumbs the head of his cock, smearing pre-cum all over, and grins when he bucks into her hand. It’s charming, she thinks, the way his hands remain fisted at his sides, refusing to touch her without express permission even as she runs her hands all over him.

“You can touch, if you like,” Allura tells him. For a moment, when Lance keeps his hands tight to his side, she’s afraid she’s misread things, that she’s taken liberties, and then a full body shiver runs through him.

“Are you sure about that?” The irises of his eyes have been reduced to the thinnest sliver of blue, leaving his gaze dark and molten. “I just … need you to be sure.”

Allura laughs and tosses her head. The bone charms in her hair chime against the broken bits of crystal that her court have braided there. “I am the keeper of this place, my own,” she all but laughs at him, “there is nothing and no one who could make me do what I do not want to do.”

“Even if it meant distracting me?”

She drags her fingers down his cock, hard and mean, and laughs again. He shivers when the sound echoes through the forest the way no mortal laugh could. “You are lovely to look upon and I will be delighted to have you as part of my court, but not even that could entice me to do what I do not wish to do.”

Lance nods slowly. She can see the way he turns that over, searching it for logical flaws, and then sighs when he finds none. Allura melts into his embrace with a coo when he slides his hands into her hair to pull her into a kiss. It’s easy to flow at his pace, to let him ease her onto her cloak where it lays across the grass, to pull him over her to kiss him as sweet as she knows how. He slots himself into her spaces with surprising confidence, as if, now that he’s been assured his welcome, he intends to find the best ways of assuring repeated invitations.

There’s a very … _precise_ sort of delicateness to his touches as he explores her body. Lance plucks along the sensitive places of her body like harpist learning a new instrument. He never closes his eyes. Allura kisses him sweet and slow, sliding her tongue along his to make him moan low in his throat, and he still watches her. It’s unsettling in the best of ways. She finds herself watching him as intensely as he watches her and delights when that pull a blush from him.

“Stop watching me,” he mutters and promptly hides his face in her shoulder. “You’ll give me a complex.”

Allura wiggles underneath him as his breath tickles sensitive places along her neck. “A complex?” She wonders. “Are you never simple, my own?”

He pulls back to consider her. “The gaps in your colloquialisms raise so many questions.” 

The way his eyelashes flutter and his mouth moves around a moan when she spreads her legs a little to wiggle against him makes her grin, wicked and pleased with herself. “Is that what they raise? Oh!”

All the words in her head are scattered to the winds whistling in the corners of the Labyrinth as Lance grinds his cock against her. She moans as he finds her clit and applies pressure that is just shy of enough. At first Lance looks supremely pleased with himself, bordering on smug, before the expression melts away to one of flustered worry. 

“I’m sorry, that was, uh,” he stutters into silence when Allura hooks a leg around his hips and rolls against him. It takes her a moment, she doesn’t know his body (yet), and the first attempt wiggle her way onto his cock just gets him wet and messy. His expression goes slightly dazed with the second roll of her hips and the tip of his cock catches at the edge of her cunt. “ _Oh._ ”

She can’t help but laugh, endeared in spite of herself, and then slap his flank. “I won’t be doing all the work,” she tells him seriously even as her heart thunders away in her chest—so hard it’s a wonder he doesn’t feel it the way they are pressed together, “I expect you to do your share.”

Lance presses a wet kiss full of teeth to her mouth before nipping his way down her chest. He places a delicate kiss to her sternum before hooking her knees into the crooks of his arms. “Do you?” He asks softly. The smile he wears is filthy and knowing. “I live to serve.”

He slides in slow and careful, as if memorizing her reaction to each inch, and they both still for a moment when he’s finally seated deep inside her. The way he stares at her, as if she were spun from starlight, leave her feeling like she might go mad if he doesn’t move. Allura doesn’t think she can take much of Lance looking at her as if she were magic itself. She clenches around him for the way it makes him close his eyes and shudder. Wrapping her hands around his neck she drags him down into another desperate kiss. “Move,” she whispers while he groans. “ _Move_.”

Lance obeys with satisfying alacrity.

Allura lets her head drop back against the soft moss with a moan. He moves with confidence, correcting his angle and tempo in time with each hitch of her breath and every moan, and soon she’s gasping, overwhelmed, as he finds the perfect spot. They fall into a rhythm that’s perfect in its irregularity. The smooth glide interrupted by the sudden need to bite down on his bottom lip, or drag his hands over her breasts, to drop one of her own hands to frame where he slides into her and grind her palm against her clit. It’s messy, full of panting breaths and small needy sounds, and yet utterly perfect. She can see all the ways they can improve, all the ways that learning each other’s bodies will make each encounter better than the last and it makes her breathless with anticipation.

Wrapping her legs around his hips so she can hook her ankles right at the small of his back, she urges him to move faster, harder, until he’s groaning her name. Lance fits a hand under her back to lift her hips just _so_ and everything goes white and blinding. Allura comes with a small plaintive cry.

“No.” The command is a breathless whine rather than a demand, but she finds the strength to flip them. “Not yet.”

“Greedy,” Lance comments as if she can’t feel him throb with every heartbeat, buried so deep inside her that she thinks she can feel him in her throat. 

Allura plants a hand in the middle of his chest. “I’ll show you _greedy_.”

She’s not expecting it when he grabs her hips with a grip that will leave bruises and drags her down to meet his thrust. She wails as she bounces in his hold. Lance plants his feet for leverage and she has to put both hands against his chest to keep from falling. Allura’s not sure when she’d shut her eyes tight against the tight, almost painful feeling of oversensitivity, but when she blinks them open, blurry with unshed tears, Lance watches her with an intensity she feels burn her skin.

Allura presses a thumb to his lips and he bites it. “Do it”—is that her voice? She sounds wrecked to pieces—”come for me. I want to see it. I want to _feel_ it so deep inside. Now, do it now.”

His eyes nearly roll back in his head as he groans. “God, fuck, Allura you can’t just _say_ shit like that.”

“I can,” she tells him as she learns to match his thrusts. “I can. I want you to come. I want to watch your face and feel it.” She puts a hand to her low belly. “Want to feel it— _Oh!_ ” 

Lance is silent as his orgasm takes him. She thinks it’s the only time she’s ever seen him rendered speechless. He keeps her pinned tight as he grinds into her, somehow managing to move them in such away that he grinds her clit as he pulses within her and she comes again with a thin wail.

The world feels both very bright and far away as she lays with him panting.

Small white flowers have erupted into full bloom around them, bobbing with a faint wind, and Allura has the vague sense that she should, perhaps, be worried about what that could mean.

“So,” Lance says slowly as if he finds words difficult. “Is this your usual way of distracting the people who try to solve your Labyrinth? Because, uh, ten out of ten on being distracted. I am very distracted. I also maybe can’t move. Or feel my toes.”

For a moment Allura feels insulted until her orgasm-sluggish brain manages to unearth itself from all the endorphins to recognize the undercurrent of concern—of insecurity—weaving its way through Lance’s words. She giggles. He lets her snuggle into him. She feels deliciously sore all over. The way he yelps and jerks when she bites one of his nipples lightly delights her.

“You would be the”—she pauses for a moment consider that, there is only Jamie before him, and Jamie is unique in all her (life) domain—”second. And the first in a long, long time.”

“Oh,” he says and then lapses into silence. The sound of the waterfall is soothing and the moss softer than it has any right to be and he’s a warmth pressed along her. The first yawn takes her by surprise, the second less so. She drifts, comfortable and sated, to the rhythm of his heartbeat. Lance breathes out slowly like he’d been holding before saying so softly Allura’s not sure she is meant to hear it: “I am so, so utterly fucked.”

Allura fits herself tighter against him and hides her smile against his skin.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> and now I am 4 for 4


End file.
